Shadows of World War 3 Loom on D-Day 80th anniversary
Fascism is ascendant at home and abroad.
“As we gather here today, it’s not just to honor those who showed such remarkable bravery on that day, June 6, 1944. It’s to listen to the echo of their voices. To hear them. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs, but they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”
So spoke President Joe Biden this week atop a cliff U.S. Army Rangers scaled 80 years ago as he commemorated the anniversary of “D-Day,” the sacrosanct day when 156,000 American, Canadian, and British soldiers stormed the French beaches of Normandy to help liberate northern France from Nazi occupation. Code-named “Operation Overlord,” the largest naval, air, and land operation in history at the time, many historians credit it as the beginning of the end of the Second World War.
While it’s customary for leaders of the war-era Allied forces to participate in the ceremonies honoring their veterans of that momentous military action, this year brings with it an even more urgent message as Europe is closer to war than it has ever been since 1945 and fascist ideology threatens democracy’s future at home and abroad.
While there are progressive voices calling for “a negotiated peace,” other nations’ autocrats are watching how the United States and its democratic allies react to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s now two-year onslaught of Europe’s largest democracy, Ukraine.
What democratic governments, particularly those in Europe, understand is that allowing Russia to run roughshod over Ukraine would give Putin a green light to march into any other country he wants. If Western allies abandon Ukraine, why shouldn’t they also abandon other European democracies under the guise of “peace”? Simply, supporting Ukraine is preventing world war three.
Three months ago, Russia all but admitted as much when Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman and head of the United Russia party Dmitry Medvedev (who played musical presidential chairs with Vladimir Putin until Putin rewrote the Russian constitution), ruling out peace talks, presented a map on which “Ukraine is definitely Russia,” altering the borders of other countries, including Poland and Romania.
In a speech, Medvedev asserted:
Our geostrategic space has been indivisible since the time of the ancient Russian state. This concept must disappear forever. Ukraine is definitely Russia.
Taking a dig at the United States and Ukraine’s other allies, he added:
Had Ukraine escaped the stupidest trap set by the United States and its allies in order to counter our country with Ukraine’s assistance and use this very “anti-Russia entity,” things might have been different.
Chinese president Xi Jinping met with Putin in October to ostensibly discuss trade at a time when there is growing concern China may invade Taiwan. Like Putin’s claim Ukraine is really historically part of Russia and not a separate country , Xi claims the island democracy of Taiwan is really part of mainland China and should be “united by force” if necessary. He’s already asserted he is prepared to go to war with western powers over it.
Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to express North Korea’s “steadfast will” to expand Russian ties, for which US officials assert North Korean weapons are being shipped to Russia.
Last week, as Biden warned of the precarity of the present moment, Vladimir Putin threatened to send long-range missiles to his allies that could be used against nations supplying Ukraine.
The main thing preventing Xi from going ahead with it is international condemnation of Russia. If Ukraine’s western allies take their eyes off Ukraine’s fight for survival, it will provide Xi and other dictators permission to follow suit with their own invasions. If we just stay out of it, as many insist we ought to do, it will be emboldening autocrats all over the world at a time when more democracies are backsliding toward authoritarian regimes.
As Biden asserted:
The autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine, to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked. We cannot let that happen. To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable.
Historian and author of On Tyranny, Prof. Timothy Snyder explained in a recent Guardian piece titled, “We’re in 1938 now: Putin’s war in Ukraine and lessons from history”:
If Ukrainians give up, or if we give up on Ukraine…It’s Russia making war in the future. It’s Russia making war with Ukrainian technology, Ukrainian soldiers from a different geographical position. At that point, we’re in 1939. We’re in 1938 now. In effect, what Ukrainians are letting us do is extend 1938.
But as European countries bolster their defenses against Russian aggression, they are experiencing a disturbing surge in right-wing advances within their own governments.
This weekend, on the heels of D-Day commemoration, European parliamentary elections resulted in hard-right gains in Italy, Austria and France.
Months ago, Dutch voters backed Geert Wilders’ anti-Islamic Freedom party, a chilling sign of how Europe’s democracies are chucking off democracy for far-right populism.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a self-described fascist, heads Italy’s farthest-right government since World War II.
Finland is tacking right.
So are Austria, Germany, and Belgium.
Hungary went authoritarian a few years ago with the election of hard-right prime minister Viktor Orbán, a staunch opponent of Ukraine aid against Russian aggression.
While Spain’s parliamentary election last year did not elicit the results the hard-right Vox party anticipated, the right is gaining ground.
Closer to home, Argentina just elected its own version of Trump, libertarian economist Javier Milei, who promises to “Make Argentina Great Again!” Human rights advocates are warning of violent suppression of anticipated protests over Milei’s economic plan, and the Argentine security minister has threatened protesters would be surveilled with “video, digital or manual means.”
Here on American soil, the republican party is equally united against democracy.
President Biden commented after signing a $95 billion foreign aid bill in April:
For months, while MAGA Republicans were blocking aid, Ukraine has been running out of artillery shells and ammunition.
In February, a former FBI informant republicans held up as a witness in their quixotic mission to impeach President Biden turned out to be a Russian mole. Alexander Smirnov, the Oversight Committee’s “star witness,” lied to the FBI when he alleged Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5 million each. Donald Trump appointed the federal prosecutor who debunked this claim.
Ohio Sen. and toady of convicted felon Trump stated in the Financial Times:
We owe it to our European partners to be honest: Americans want allies in Europe, not client states, and our generosity in Ukraine is coming to an end. Europeans should regard the conclusion of the war there as an imperative. And Europe should consider how exactly it is going to live with Russia when the war in Ukraine is over.
About Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán, Vance said, “I think he’s made smart decisions that we could learn from in the United States.”
Trump has been carrying water for Vladimir Putin for years. Trump spent his entire four years as president as a mouthpiece for Putin’s ultimate wish to destroy the international alliance that he sees as preventing him from re-creating the Soviet Union.
Trump’s elevation to the presidency was the outcome of a coordinated disinformation campaign that included insidious social media infiltration and exploiting internal political divisions.
While Vladimir Putin can’t communicate directly with the American people, the twice-impeached, four-times indicted former reality TV slumlord found criminally liable for rape and recently convicted on 34 counts of business fraud can and is, and MAGA members of Congress are complicit, actively working against American interests in favor of Putin’s.
NBC News reported in February:
Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense. The comments will do little to ease concerns in Europe about U.S. dependability, with military aid that Ukraine desperately needs held up in Congress and the front-runner for the GOP nomination now reiterating his long-standing skepticism of America’s historical commitments to its allies.
The Republican party deigning to Trump’s every maniacal whim would likely have no problem using its well-funded right-wing hate media machine to justify going along with him. There would be some opposition, sure, but if the past four decades, and definitely the past seven years, are any indication, the bulwark between democracy and fascism that used to protect the United States is rapidly eroding.
The outcome of November’s election could mean nothing less than the United States being the next country to ditch democracy in favor of strong-man autocracy.
The blueprint for this is called “Project 2025,” and, according to its website, it proposes a goal to “rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left” by “build[ing] on four pillars that will, collectively, pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.” Its author, the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Dan, explains the process seeks to “roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington.”
Whether or not Donald Trump ever sees the inside of the White House again, Project 2025’s “candidate-agnostic” goal is “to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative.”
Apparently laid out during Trump’s tenure in the White House, the plan would require independent agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to submit action proposals directly to the president himself “for review.”
Former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head during the Trump administration, Russell Vought, told the Times:
What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them. It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.
In other words, if it isn’t in the Constitution, it’s perfectly fine to hand it off to the president to control it.
In 2022, Donald Trump returned to the Washington, DC to deliver a rant at the “America First Policy Institute” summit.
First, he called for concentration camps for the unhoused, in addition to the ones he established for migrants at the Southern border with Mexico.
Combining the human rights violations we committed against Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries and Japanese Americans during World War Two, Trump asserted the government should “remove” thousands of unhoused Americans and relocate them to tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” with “permanent bathrooms” and “medical professionals.”
Then, channeling his inner former Philippine president Roderigo Duterte, Trump suggested executing drug dealers.
He praised China’s undemocratic policies toward suspected criminals.
In addition to favoring a return to the racist “stop-and-frisk policies in cities,” Trump insisted that if he were still in office, he would override governors and mayors, and deploy the national guard to high-crime neighborhoods.
Should Trump or anyone aspiring to be like him ever again gain the levers of power, this is part of the road map toward autocracy we can expect.
It happens from within, and the machinations to accomplish it are already in motion. It’s happening on social media and in mainstream media.
Let’s not “sleepwalk into dictatorship,” as former Republican House member Liz Cheney said recently.