After the Fall of France in June 1940, Winston Churchill. in courageous words that echo down the halls of history, steeled his countrymen for what was to come next:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
We who were born after the war have lived our whole lives in those "broad, sunlit uplands," however hilly or rocky they may have seemed in part; in the Western world at least, we have lived in times of peace and plenty, blessed with a panoply of comforts and conveniences undreamed of by any previous generation, and available to all but the most abjectly poor.
Antibiotics, vaccinations, and ingenious new treatments for all sorts of bodily ills and injuries have allowed us, collectively, to live longer, healthier, and consequently happier lives than any generation who came before us. How very lucky we were, how blessed, to have lived in the second half of the twentieth century, and into the first quarter of the twenty-first. In material terms, the human race never had it so good.
And yet, times change. Mr. Starmer. who in all likelihood will shortly be the next prime minister of Great Britain, said just the other day, "The post-war era is over and a new age of insecurity has begun." He might be putting it mildly. I think all halfway intelligent people must view the current trend of things as very alarming - frightening - horrifying, even.
But today I will say only that I am mindful of and deeply grateful for the sacrifices made by those soldiers, sailors, and airmen in 1944, who died so that my generation could grow up in peace and prosperity and freedom. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.
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2 comments:
On one of the news reports I heard one d-day soldier in a wheelchair say something to the effect of "It's time we stop having these stupid wars." I couldn't help picturing him channeling his 18 year old self, merely a child invading Normandy and saying those words. Has there ever been a time when humans were not at war with one another? I have never understood it.
No, there has never been such a time, or at least not for long. The hundred years in Europe from the defeat of Napoleon to the outbreak of WWI in 1914 were a long era of peace not unlike our postwar era, but that century was marred by the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and a miscellany of short conflicts; and the colonial powers had numerous overseas conflicts too.
The reason why wars happen is that there are always bullies, thieves, and egomaniacs who just have to take what somebody else has, and don't give a damn about peace and clouds and flowers. There are also fanatics and crazies who think God or their philosophy entitles them to enslave and dictate to everyone else.
So you get bad guys who will take over everything unless they are stopped. That's why there have to armies and navies, etc.; just as there have to be police to deal with criminals. A necessary thing in this imperfect world.
That's the tragic irony of the human condition: sometimes very near the sexless angels, other times very near the brutish apes. There is a peaceful middle way between extremes, but not everyone finds it.
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