Another "how dare he from Trump," this one may be his most insensitive one yet, By Hal M. Brown Trump wants you to celebrate his Liberation Day. Let's remember the real liberation days when millions of lives were saved.

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The photo above shows Dutch civilians and Canadian Army troops celebrating the liberation of Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (Credit: Alexander M. Stirton/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-134377). You can click this photo and the other photos below to go to the websites which featured them.

A good friend of mine experienced a true liberation day when she was a child. She lived in a small village in the Netherlands that had been occupied by the Nazis. Even though she was a young child at the time she has an indelible memory of the day that American paratroopers landed in the village square and people came out to greet them. 

Several American soldiers ended up in front of her house and her parents invited them inside and gave them a meal. 

Several years later some of those soldiers came back to visit them for a heartfelt reunion.

The Canadians played an outsized role in liberating the Netherlands. This is particularly both ironic and disgusting since Trump has turned Canada into an enemy he wants to basically invade.

The photo below is from “A Dutch Spy’s Photographs of the Liberation of the Netherlands – May 1945.”

We’ve all seen photos of concentration camp survivors which were taken by Allied liberators so I won’t include them in this Substack.

You’ve been hibernating if you have missed Trump’s hyping tomorrow as his Liberation Day.

I can’t imagine that Trump doesn’t know that this term has a deep meaning to millions of people. How warped and pathological can a person be to use these words to glorify himself for instituting a political policy? I don’t have to answer this.

It is hard to find words to express how insensitive and downright disgusting it is that he uses this term in reference to tarrifs, the word he says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He may not know that Trumpism is in the dictionary.

The liberation of Nazi occupied Europe began with D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. There was an enormous number of Allied casualties on just D-Day itself. This is estimated at 4,900 Allied troops were killed, went missing, and were wounded during the assault.

The total number of casualties that occurred during Operation Overlord, from June 6 (the date of D-Day) to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine) was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties:

• Nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces

• 16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces.

• Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces)

• 125,847 from the US ground forces.

Reference.

World War II took six years before the Allies achieved their final victory with the surrender of Japan. This was formalized on on the Battleship Missouri:

(Personal note” When I was a child the Missouri visited New York harbor and we went on a tour and saw where the capitulation was signed. I was amazed to see the inside of those gun turrets and the six inch thick armor protecting the ship.)

Addendum:

If you subscribe to The Washington Post this is well worth reading (here).

This is what Phillip Bump wrote:

I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long. There’s not a really great comparative model, but countries like Ukraine and Ecuador have kind of broadly resembled that in the last 30 years. The United States is a much more high performance state in democracy than those two countries, so we’re not going to really look like Ukraine or Ecuador. But the idea of passing back and forth between governments that behave well but don’t perform well and more autocratic governments that also fail to consolidate power? I think that’s right now where I’d put my dollar.

You probaly know who Ruth Ben-Ghiat is. If not, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection.

This is what she wrote in Phillip Bump’s Washington Post column “What America could look like a decade from now? Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.”

If Trump and MAGA stayed in power for the long term, the U.S. would be acting in concert with authoritarian leaders and would have likely invaded some territories of democracy, as well as lending support to others’ autocratic aggressions, for example in Taiwan.

Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.

However, I believe there will be a reckoning as the outcomes of the plunder operation on benefits and government and the costs of propping up Russian leader Vladimir Putin become clear to Americans. To stop that reckoning, recourse to repression may be necessary, and that will also be unpopular.

Of all the experts writing heir prediction her’s may be the most optimistic.

Consider: 

This is from Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy at Cornell University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering. The administration’s simultaneous attacks on the legal profession, the federal bureaucracy, higher education and the U.S. military are destroying the societal pillars of American greatness with blinding speed.

Basic government functions are being turned off, seemingly at random and illegally, by Elon Musk and his ragtag crew of coders. And U.S. alliances are fraying, as countries around the world are adjusting to an administration that publicly threatens to abandon its treaty commitments while beating a hasty retreat in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese power. For its part, Congress has abdicated its own responsibility to serve as a check on the presidency, with GOP members counting on Trump’s brashness and charisma to protect them from voters.

Back to the Nazis. It took six years for World War II to end. We don’t have to speculate as to what the world would look like 10 years later. Russia became a dictatorship and a superpower. Democracy won the day in Germany and Japan. The NATO alliance was established in 1949. The United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.

We do not know what Trump will turn the country into during his tenure at president. If it is the one or another form of authoritarian state we don’t know how long it will take for democracy to be restored or what it will take to achieve this outcome.

The war to undo what the Axis did took six years. The only efforts so far have been in courtrooms where despite victories against Trump as far as having an effect on stopping Trump’s blitzkrieg have been about as effective as shooting Nerf balls at a tank.

Read my previous Substacks here.

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There's an ethical lesson to be learned from the collapse of the Dutch government over immigration policy

 

By Hal Brown

This blog story is avalialable on a single page here, along with the Disquis comment secton at bottom of page.

Here's a basic summary of what inspried todays blog from CNN: 

Below are three points which address what I consder to be basic ethical concerns. They are from this New York Times (subscription) article from July 7th.

1. “One of the values that are important with the proposals is that children grow up with their parents,” a statement by the Christian Union party said. “As a family party, that is what we stand for.” The party said it wanted to work with “heart and soul for a humane and effective migration policy.”
2. The large numbers of arrivals have strained the Netherlands’ housing capacity, which was already suffering a shortage for the country’s more than 17 million people.
3. “Everybody wants to find a good, effective solution that also does justice to the fact that this is about human lives,” the finance minister, Sigrid Kaag, a member of the D66 party, said before the talks began.

The belief that there is a moral imperative for being willing to sacrifice your own comfort, up to your own life in extraordinary circumstances, is a core tenet of all or most of the world's religions and a basis for the philosophy of ethics. 

As Wiki explains, "ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime."

Whether in the Netherlands or the United States the immigration of people fleeing persecution, sometimes risking their lives to do so, has been a major divisive poltical issue.

At the most simple level this boils down to actually giving up something tangible, for example in the Netherlands better housing capacity or something intangible like in the United States and other countries the sharing of your country with people of other ethnic and relgious backgrounds and life styles.

From immigration to human rights for everyone including groups not only demonized by Trump and more blatantly (if we ever thought this was possible by a right-winger) by DeSantis, but also like Marine Le Pen in France, it's all about ethics. More specifically it is about a lack of ethics.

When I was considering writing this I shared some of my ideas with a dear friend whose parents survived a NAZI concentration camp. She reminded me of this line from "The Diary of Anne Frank": 

“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

She wrote this about a month before she and her family were arrested.

Anne Frank was in her early to mid-teens when in hiding and we can speculate that despite the abject fear she lived with knowing what she and her family's fate could be, she depserately tried to maintain her optimistic view that deep down all people were good at heart.

To contemplate that this is not demonstrated in real life and that while there are people who try to live their lives adhering as best as they can to an ethical code, there are those who, to put it bluntly, are just plain evil

By conincidence in relationship to my writing this blog about Dutch politics, this was written when she and he family were in hiding in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

During World War II the NAZI's occupied the Netherlands and about 75% of the Jews living their were sent to concentration camps where most of them were killed.

Between 25,000  and 34,000 Jews fled from Germany in the 1930's. For more see The Holocaust in The Netherlands from Wikipedia.

Dutch citizens had engaged in a valient and fierce resistance againt the NAZI's which you can read about here.

Also by chance, as I did some research about the Netherlands and the Holocaust I came across tis article:

The article begins with a reference to Anne Frank:

The story of teenage diarist Anne Frank is known across the world. But a new survey suggests a “disturbing” lack of awareness about the Holocaust in the Netherlands, where she and her family hid for years before being discovered and deported to a Nazi concentration camp.

and goes on as follows:

A Dutch Holocaust survivor and Jewish cultural leaders have expressed dismay at the survey, which was released Wednesday and suggests that more than half of the residents were not aware of the deportation and murder of Jews from the country during World War II.

The survey, conducted and released by the New York-based nonprofit Claims Conference ahead of International Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday, found that 53% of the respondents couldn’t identify the Netherlands as a country where the events of the Holocaust happened — rising to 60% among millennial and Gen Z respondents, meaning those under 40.

Historians estimate more than 70% of the Netherlands’ prewar Jewish population was killed during the Holocaust, more than 100,000 in total. Frank hid in a secret room in Amsterdam with her family from 1942 to 1944 before she died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp weeks before its liberation.

I can do no better than to end this blog with a quote from Mark Lezer who was six when the NAZI's invaded the Netherlands and who lost family in the Holocaust. He said it is imperative that the story of the Holocaust should never be allowed to fade from memory.

“Because if you don’t know enough about the Holocaust and you do not know that so many people died because of the Nazi persecution, then you do not know enough to be realistic about the future.”

This should go not only for the Dutch, but for everyone whose country is facing a push by authoriatians who envision ruling over a country not too different than what Hitler wanted for Germany.