While we're remembering stuff

June 6, 2012

The list of things that can make me cry these days is thankfully short. My kids. My dogs. A Beastie Boy dying. Oh, and D-Day veterans.

You’d be forgiven for missing it amid all the brouhaha over our hereditary overlords (no pun intended), but 68 years ago today, hordes of young men probably younger than the average Tumblr™ user waded from landing craft into which they had been placed, not by choice, but by conscription, into a living nightmare of blood, death, horror and destruction. Many would be killed or hideously maimed instantly. Others would help liberate Europe from the Nazis. A few would go on to confront the unspeakable bestiality of the camps.

Back in 1994, on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, I sat and wept as I watched, on TV, the veterans gathered in remembrance in Normandy. I thought, as I watched these dignified old men, of the terror they would have gone through when they hit those beaches, only a few years older than my son was at the time.

I was reminded of all this today, as the cretinous, mawkish fuss surrounding the Jubilee finally began to subside, and as a friend tweeted how she was thinking of her late father - a D-Day veteran and a liberator of the camps. What would he think, were he alive today? When we send young men and women to kill and be killed, not by necessity but by choice; when we massacre innocents by remote control; and when we condemn whole populations to live and die amid a medieval horror that is entirely of our making.

And for what? For approval ratings. For cheap fuel. For bragging rights at the next NATO summit. And to line the pockets of weapons manufacturers.

How decadent, how disgusting, we have become.