June 8, 2007
Normandy and Anti-Americanism Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:00 AM EST I appreciated Fred Smoler’s reflections on his visit to Normandy in June of 2004 for the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. I can only imagine what a moving experience that must have been. In his post, Mr. Smoler effectively unpacks and dismantles some of the European editorial criticism of the United States’s war in Iraq. Specifically, he rebuts the charge that the United States is essentially an occupier, an invader, and a supporter of fascism, less like the force Eisenhower led on June 6, 1944, than the one he fought against. Mr. Smoler also notes the relative lack of anti-American criticism visible on this week’s D-Day anniversary: “This year, no one is making noise about how we are betraying our legacy, nor, for that matter, about the legacy itself.” If I’m not misreading him, I take it that Mr. Smoler sees this situation as a mixed bag. On the one hand, no one is unfairly deriding the United States; on the other, few are remembering its greatest hours, either. Again, if I’m reading his sentiments correctly, I sympathize. A few days ago, in a post about John Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday, I wrote that the occasion wasn’t “especially significant this time around just because it includes a round number.” Unfortunately, when it comes to remembering events like those of June 6, the roundness of anniversary years is all too pivotal in determining how strong our memories are. On Mr. Smoler’s final point, I’d like to briefly put forward some thoughts aimed at explaining the relative dearth of anti-American criticism related to the D-Day anniversary this year. In addition to the fact that the anniversary has been observed less widely, in general, I’d suggest two other explanations, both related to the use and abuse of historical memory. The first is that, while critics of American policy are apparently less willing, this week, to twist the stories of World War II in order to assail the United States, so are boosters of American policy more timid in their creative employment of the same stories. In 2004, Le Monde editorialists were not the only ones misusing the history of the Second World War. At the Republican National Convention, Rudy Giuliani likened George Bush to Winston Churchill, and in an interview with “Good Morning America,” Dick Cheney seemed to liken himself to FDR while answering a question about the relationship between military service and presidential leadership. What’s more, at least as early as 2002, Donald Rumsfeld was likening the Bush administration’s global attitude to that of Churchill in 1938 and implying, less than subtly, that its liberal critics had more in common with the hapless Neville Chamberlain. Whatever you think of the President and his policies, such historical analogies seem a little imprudent. Casting one’s own, highly contested policy decisions in the stark moral terms of the Second World War is a recipe for brewing resentment among one’s opponents. It almost invites comparisons of equal and opposite absurdity, such as the one in Le Monde. This doesn’t excuse the French paper’s anti-American sentiments, but it does put them in the context of a trans-Atlantic exchange of simplistic historical analogy. Since then, as the situation in Iraq has continued to worsen, the Churchill/FDR talk here in the United States has become far less strident. And, in a kind of mutual disarmament, Europeans seem less bent on linking the current American administration to the Third Reich. The second point I’d like to make on this subject, and more briefly, is that the D-Day anniversary has also inspired less reflection on World War II and less related name-calling because a more apt historical analogy has developed for the Iraq war: Vietnam. These days, when people talk about Iraq, they are far more likely to refer to the Tet Offensive than the Normandy invasion. Even supporters of the war have fallen into this habit, with David Petraeus winning plaudits for his competence in the form of comparisons not to Eisenhower, but to Creighton Abrams. I tend to think this analogy is also imperfect (the consequences of defeat in Iraq are, for example, far worse than the consequences of defeat in Vietnam) but it’s something of an improvement.
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