Tomorrow, June 6th, is the 79th anniversary of D-Day. As I wrote from Britain on the 75th anniversary, almost 160,000 troops from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States — including smaller contingents from Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Poland — invaded Nazi-occupied Europe on the beaches of Normandy.  Over the next three months of fighting, 209,000 Allied troops would die before the Nazis were pushed back across the Seine.

June 6, 1944 — D-Day — should never be forgotten. It was a time when the countries of the world came together to combat bigotry, racism, and hatred.  Many men and women made the ultimate sacrifice in that fight.

Months after that invasion, as the Allies were closing in on Berlin and Nazi Germany, the U.S. Army distributed one of its weekly pamphlets to the troops. The topic for the week was “FASCISM!”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson included much of the text from that pamphlet in her recent Memorial Day Letters from an American newsletter. It is worth the full read as we think about the sacrifices made by our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and millions of others in this country during the 1940s to defeat Hitler. It is important to read it as well in the context of the efforts by our home-grown fascists to take over and destroy our democracy today.

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

The pamphlet writers noted that fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy — faith in the common sense of the common people — was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few.” That’s why they fought so hard against democracy.

And those writers in 1945 went on to point out that America had its own history with fascism, and that those who pushed for a government by the few and for the few would continue to try and take over our country.

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’”

To do so, they would use three techniques:

• First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

• Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. . .

• Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

As we look at America in 2023, there are clear signs of a large segment of one party that is turning to fascism and its techniques to retain power in the face of the declining popularity of their policies. We see:

• voter suppression to keep those they oppose from exercising their democratic right to self-representation;

• extreme gerrymandering to thwart the will of the people by keeping the minority in power;

• corrupt Supreme Court justices who disregard law and precedent to shape the country into their vision of government by the powerful and for the powerful;

• use of violence against political enemies; dehumanization of minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and immigrants;

• control over women’s bodies and reproductive rights;

• extreme patriotism;

• Christian nationalism; and

• much more straight out of the fascist playbook.

In 2019 I quoted an op-ed by Michele Heller — whose father served at D-Day — from the Washington Post to help Americans remember what our parents’ generation was fighting against and how that contrasts with our current amnesia over the importance of leadership.  She ends her remembrance of her father — a Jew who escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and eventually found safety in the United States, only to enlist two years later in the U.S. Army “to fight, as many immigrants still do, for their adopted country” — with the following:

“They all were war heroes — the captured, the killed, the wounded, the mentally maimed, the lucky survivors such as my dad — because of circumstance, not desire. They went to war because of what happened when xenophobia and demagoguery supplanted real leadership.”

Demagoguery, xenophobia, and hatred remain all too prevalent in today’s America. As we remember the anniversary of one of the key battles in that fight against fascism, let us never forget that the fight for democracy never ends.

More to come…

DJB

Photo of American cemetery at Normandy by DJB.