from NewsBusters:
WashPost Commemorates D-Day: Don’t Forget ‘Dark Side of American War Efforts’![Image result for d-day remembered]()
It’s the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Getting a little choked up about the endless lines of white crosses and the few stooped and wizened survivors being rolled slowly among them? Feeling slightly in awe of men who could scale Pointe du Hoc, drag themselves up the shingle on Omaha or jump from an airplane into tracers and flak? Feeling, well, a touch grateful? That’s nice. Time’s up.
The Washington Post wants you to remember “the dark side of American war efforts,” so it’s June 6 edition contains an op-ed by one Ruth Lawlor, who bravely parachuted into a PhD candidacy in history at the University of Cambridge and is tenaciously fighting to hold a Fox International Fellowship at Yale. Lawlor said we’re celebrating “one of the most storied moments of “the good war,” when the forces of freedom and democracy stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate France and, ultimately, the rest of Europe. But how accurate is our memory of this event?”
Given the state of our public schools, I doubt it’s very near the mark, but you know that’s not what she’s on about:
In joining the global war effort, the U.S. government and military claimed to fight for the Four Freedoms and decried Hitler’s racist ideology. But they also scapegoated African American soldiers for sexual crimes abroad, used false stories about rape to justify racial segregation at home and ignored sexual crimes committed by white GIs.
Wait, that’s it? Lawler and The Post inserted themselves into a solemn commemoration of a hard-won and unimpeachably noble victory to tell us: 1.) bad things happen in war; 2.) American blacks were treated badly in the 1940s; and 3.) some Southerners didn’t behave morally in their ongoing defense of the morally indefensible?