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The photo above shows Dutch civilians and Canadian Army troops celebrating the liberation of Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (Credit: Alexander M. Stirton/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-134377). You can click this photo and the other photos below to go to the websites which featured them.
A good friend of mine experienced a true liberation day when she was a child. She lived in a small village in the Netherlands that had been occupied by the Nazis. Even though she was a young child at the time she has an indelible memory of the day that American paratroopers landed in the village square and people came out to greet them.
Several American soldiers ended up in front of her house and her parents invited them inside and gave them a meal.
Several years later some of those soldiers came back to visit them for a heartfelt reunion.
The Canadians played an outsized role in liberating the Netherlands. This is particularly both ironic and disgusting since Trump has turned Canada into an enemy he wants to basically invade.
The photo below is from “A Dutch Spy’s Photographs of the Liberation of the Netherlands – May 1945.”
We’ve all seen photos of concentration camp survivors which were taken by Allied liberators so I won’t include them in this Substack.
You’ve been hibernating if you have missed Trump’s hyping tomorrow as his Liberation Day.
I can’t imagine that Trump doesn’t know that this term has a deep meaning to millions of people. How warped and pathological can a person be to use these words to glorify himself for instituting a political policy? I don’t have to answer this.
It is hard to find words to express how insensitive and downright disgusting it is that he uses this term in reference to tarrifs, the word he says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He may not know that Trumpism is in the dictionary.
The liberation of Nazi occupied Europe began with D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. There was an enormous number of Allied casualties on just D-Day itself. This is estimated at 4,900 Allied troops were killed, went missing, and were wounded during the assault.
The total number of casualties that occurred during Operation Overlord, from June 6 (the date of D-Day) to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine) was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties:
Nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces
16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces.
Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces)
125,847 from the US ground forces.
Reference.
World War II took six years before the Allies achieved their final victory with the surrender of Japan. This was formalized on on the Battleship Missouri:
(Personal note” When I was a child the Missouri visited New York harbor and we went on a tour and saw where the capitulation was signed. I was amazed to see the inside of those gun turrets and the six inch thick armor protecting the ship.)
Addendum:
If you subscribe to The Washington Post this is well worth reading (here).
This is what Phillip Bump wrote:
I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long. There’s not a really great comparative model, but countries like Ukraine and Ecuador have kind of broadly resembled that in the last 30 years. The United States is a much more high performance state in democracy than those two countries, so we’re not going to really look like Ukraine or Ecuador. But the idea of passing back and forth between governments that behave well but don’t perform well and more autocratic governments that also fail to consolidate power? I think that’s right now where I’d put my dollar.
You probaly know who Ruth Ben-Ghiat is. If not, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection.
This is what she wrote in Phillip Bump’s Washington Post column “What America could look like a decade from now? Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.”
If Trump and MAGA stayed in power for the long term, the U.S. would be acting in concert with authoritarian leaders and would have likely invaded some territories of democracy, as well as lending support to others’ autocratic aggressions, for example in Taiwan.
Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.
However, I believe there will be a reckoning as the outcomes of the plunder operation on benefits and government and the costs of propping up Russian leader Vladimir Putin become clear to Americans. To stop that reckoning, recourse to repression may be necessary, and that will also be unpopular.
Of all the experts writing heir prediction her’s may be the most optimistic.
Consider:
This is from Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy at Cornell University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering. The administration’s simultaneous attacks on the legal profession, the federal bureaucracy, higher education and the U.S. military are destroying the societal pillars of American greatness with blinding speed.
Basic government functions are being turned off, seemingly at random and illegally, by Elon Musk and his ragtag crew of coders. And U.S. alliances are fraying, as countries around the world are adjusting to an administration that publicly threatens to abandon its treaty commitments while beating a hasty retreat in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese power. For its part, Congress has abdicated its own responsibility to serve as a check on the presidency, with GOP members counting on Trump’s brashness and charisma to protect them from voters.
Back to the Nazis. It took six years for World War II to end. We don’t have to speculate as to what the world would look like 10 years later. Russia became a dictatorship and a superpower. Democracy won the day in Germany and Japan. The NATO alliance was established in 1949. The United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.
We do not know what Trump will turn the country into during his tenure at president. If it is the one or another form of authoritarian state we don’t know how long it will take for democracy to be restored or what it will take to achieve this outcome.
The war to undo what the Axis did took six years. The only efforts so far have been in courtrooms where despite victories against Trump as far as having an effect on stopping Trump’s blitzkrieg have been about as effective as shooting Nerf balls at a tank.
Read my previous Substacks here.
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