Without the Allied bravery and vision of that distant June 1944, Europe would have been nothing more than a Soviet dominion over which the hammer and sickle would have waved. Nothing the free world has done in the last seven and a half decades would have been possible without the terrible foundation laid by the Normandy invasion. Where Soviet forces moved to replace one totalitarian yoke with another, the Americans, British, and Canadians gave Europe self-determination, which the “Atlantic Charter” stated to be a cardinal tenet. This glorious day in June 1944 resulted in the regeneration of liberal democracy in Western Europe.
For those on the other side of the “iron curtain,” in the realm of Soviet savagery, June 6, 1944, was the name of a promise of liberty and liberation for half a century. Popular democracies have failed to extinguish this instinct for freedom, and 1989 represents the triumph of an unconquered spirit. From the Warsaw insurgency to the Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Solidarity battle, captive Europe has not ceased fighting, and its sacrifices echo those on the Norman shores. Without freedom, there is no future worth considering.
June 6, 1944, recalls those who treacherously suggested a break between Europe and the United States of the essential virtue of Atlantic cooperation. When humanity is attacked, isolationism and cowardice are fatal. History has not ended since Putin’s Russia and China are just modern manifestations of the evil that ravaged the twentieth century. The courage of June 1944 is the courage we must relearn to reassert against our enemies, our shared identity founded on human dignity and political freedom.
