THE LONGEST DAY REVISITED

I just finished committing my thoughts on the death of Ronald Reagan to a dubious posterity, and if all goes well, they will appear in LA CityBeat this coming Thursday, and you’ll find a link right here on Doc40. Until then I can have little more to say without preempting what I’ve already written, and that wouldn’t be right.

And talking of preempting, the passing of the old TV patriarch rather did it to yesterday's big 60th aniversary if D-Day, but kaymo sends the following as an antidote to any excess of posthumous military self-congratulation.

Self deception seems to be the flavor of the hour this weekend. Reagan's death has brought all kinds of right wing blowhard hypocrites back onto TV, with scarcely a mention of Iran/Contra, or the sale of nerve gas to a certain Iraqi "strongman" named Saddam Hussein. And over in Normandy we have the Western self-congratulations club talking up D-Day as the "event that turned the tide" back in 1944. Which, of course, is self-serving rubbish. Without taking anything away from the 50,000 or so Allied soldiers who died in the battle for Normandy, we need to put their achievement in perspective. While the British and Canadian armies were fighting tooth and nail to dislodge the 12th SS Panzer Division from the town of Caen, a struggle that went on for more than a month, and American forces were capturing the Cotentin peninsula and opening up the western end of the Normandy front, on the other side of Europe, in Byelorussia, the Soviet Red Army was smashing the entire Wehrmacht Army Group Center. 1.4 million Russians, equipped with 5,200 tanks, supported by 5,000 aircraft, were unleashed on 23 June against the 1.2 million strong Axis forces, with 900 tanks and 1350 aircraft of Army Group Center that were marshalled in a deeply echeloned defensive position. By the time the Hitlerjugend fanatics of the SS had been pried out of Caen, around July 20th, the Red Army had blasted its way through many miles of German defenses and hurried westwards, capturing hundreds of thousands of troops and territory equal to that of France in its entirety. We will not see any commemoration of the Byelorussian Campaign of the summer of 44 on our TVs this year. Nor will we hear a whisper of these truths.

1/ If the Nazis had not been engaged in a struggle to the death with the Soviet Union there would not have been any D-Day in Normandy. In fact, atomic weapons would have been the only way to
break Hitler's grip on Europe, and the use of atomic weapons on European cities would have posed a very different political challenge from their use on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

2/ The drive behind D-Day and the Anglo-US invasion of France was the very strong fear that the
Soviet Union would defeat Nazi Germany single handed sometime in 1945 and liberate France itself not long after. This would have provided the ultimate in nightmarish outcomes to British weakness and American isolationism in the 1920s and 30s, a Soviet Europe encompassing everything north of the Alps and the Pyrenees.

MEANWHILE...

Davinian sends the link to following sample on online Jesus merch that has to be seen to be believed especially the martial arts figurine.
http://www.boricreligious.com/JesusSportsDetail.htm

While capitolhillblue is making itself the hottest new Bush-hater gossip site, with stories like this one that I devoutly hope are true
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4636.shtml

CRYPTIQUE – Dee plus one.