The fallen heroes of Normandy, the United States, Europe, and the price of greatness

Today is June 6th. It is a date that all Europeans should remember with special gratitude towards the heroes.

Normandy landings: Russian propaganda and what Europe would have been without D-Day
The figures of the American and British aid that prevented the defeat of the USSR in the WWII

On that day, thousands of young men from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries fell fighting on the beaches of Normandy. We Europeans are indebted to those heroes, because today we owe them a great deal for our freedom and democracy, and for not having to be subjugated by that band of swastika-wielding criminals who for years ravaged several European countries and perpetrated one of the worst genocides in history, with the Jewish people as its main victims.

Unlike what happened in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet communists replaced the Nazi yoke with the red yoke, the Western Allies restored freedom to the countries they wrested from the clutches of the Third Reich. In that victory over Nazism, the United States played a crucial role, both because of its economic power and its military might. Without the help of the United States, Nazism would probably not have been defeated, or the cost of victory would have been much higher for Europe.

Certainly, many US citizens have reason to feel angry about the ingratitude of many Europeans. Anti-Americanism is not only a foolish attitude, but it also demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation for all the effort and sacrifices made by our great ally across the Atlantic in its fight for freedom. But the attitude of some Europeans—not all—should not prevent our US allies from seeing the admiration many of us feel for that great nation, nor should it make the people of that country forget their responsibility to the free world.

On February 28, 1906, speaking about his own country, the then Liberal MP Winston Churchill declared in the British Parliament: "Where there is great power there is great responsibility, where there is less power there is less responsibility, and where there is no power there can, I think, be no responsibility." Churchill's words are easy to understand: when the peace and security of the West are at risk, we cannot expect as much from a small country as from a powerful nation like the United States, which from its very foundation has been dedicated to the cause of freedom.

Already during the Second World War, in a speech at Harvard University, on September 6, 1943, Churchill reminded the United States of a concept that that great nation should never forget:

"The price of greatness is responsibility. If the people of the United States had continued in a mediocre station, struggling with the wilderness, absorbed in their own affairs, and a factor of no consequence in the movement of the world, they might have remained forgotten and undisturbed beyond their protecting oceans: but one cannot rise to be in many ways the leading community in the civilised world without being involved in its problems, without being convulsed by its agonies and inspired by its causes.

If this has been proved in the past, as it has been, it will become indisputable in the future. The people of the United States cannot escape world responsibility. Although we live in a period so tumultuous that little can be predicted, we may be quite sure that this process will be intensified with every forward step the United States make in wealth and in power. Not only are the responsibilities of this great Republic growing, but the world over which they range is itself contracting in relation to our powers of locomotion at a positively alarming rate."

The citizens of the United States who fell in World War II demonstrated the moral stature of their great nation, a country that after the treacherous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could have concentrated on the Pacific theater and forgotten about Africa and Europe (the USSR did not declare war on Japan until August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, when the Japanese empire was already practically defeated).

The United States not only did not turn its back on its European allies, but also, after the end of the war, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 to help Western Europe recover from its ruins —another great favor that some foolish Europeans also seem to have forgotten. That is the great country that many of us admire. That is how the greatness of a nation is demonstrated, not by turning its back on the world as other countries did during those years.

God bless America.

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Photo: Jon Sailer.