If the Dead Could Talk

Victor Davis Hanson has a new post up at National Review Online Click on the title or "Read the Whole Thing" at the end for the full article.

"Victor Davis Hanson
NRO Contributor
July 30, 2004, 12:25 a.m

If the Dead Could Talk
They’d teach us a thing or two about war.

The last two weeks I have been following the route of the American Army's drive from Normandy into Germany in 1944-5. It is quite something to visit Aachen, Mainz, the Hürtzen forest, Bastogne, Omaha Beach, and Pointe du Hoc, and then juxtapose such visits with the daily pabulum in the International Herald Tribune, CNN, and the European dailies. And after two weeks, I think most would prefer the wisdom of the noble dead to the ignorance of the shameful living.

There are over 10,400 Americans resting in the World War II cemetery at St. Avold in the Lorraine — more dead here than at the Normandy grounds. No sitting American president, I am told, has ever visited the graveyard. One should.

The necropolis of thousands of uniform white crosses and Stars of David leaves the visitor mute — sadly, unlike the experience of visiting many of the World War II museums in Holland and Germany. The inscriptions at American graveyards admonish the visitor to remember sacrifice, courage, and freedom; they assume somebody bad once started a war to hurt the weak, only to fail when somebody better stopped them.

In contrast, the "folly" of war — to paraphrase Barbara Tuchman — is what one gleans at most World War II museums in Europe. The displays, tapes, and guides suggest that a sudden madness once descended equally upon normal-thinking Europeans and Americans at places like Nijmegen and Remagen. "Stupidity," a European visitor at Arnhem lectured me, best explains why thousands of young men killed each other for no good reason over "meaningless" bridges. Perhaps — but I suppose the answer to that also depends on whether in September 1944 you ended up on the German or on the Allied side of Arnhem.

At places like Nejmegen one now reads less about the Holocaust, the invasion of Poland, and the Nazi hijacking of German culture, and much more about the need for eternal peace, along with notes about the necessity to stop racism and oppression.

Europe now really does believe that such evil disappeared spontaneously, without Willies and Joes driving to their flaming deaths in thin-skinned Sherman tanks to stop SS murderers in 70-ton Tigers. But then in a world where George Bush last year was said to be a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein, why should one be surprised that affluent Westerners perhaps feel SS killers led by Sepp Dietrich were as much victims of war as the defenseless Belgian civilians they butchered? It was not always so: The message of Verdun is not just the wastage of a million men, but also the courage of the outmanned and outgunned French turning back and stopping a different — and far worse — vision of Europe's future.

July has been a bad month for our civilization. Islamic terrorists right out of Gibbon's pages on Attila are caught with heads of their victims in their refrigerators in Saudi Arabia — while Britain and the United States squabble over the extradition of an Islamic fascist whose career was dedicated to convincing Muslims in the West to destroy the United States while whining that infidels were occupying the ancient caliphate. In fact, the opposite is true: Detroit is the largest community of expatriate Arabs in the world outside the Middle East. Emigrants flock to gracious hosts in Michigan to live under tolerance and freedom impossible in their own Arab countries.

In response, crazy al Qaeda videos keep airing on their official mouthpiece, al Jazeera, depicting Western interlopers squatting on "Arab lands." Can someone please tell the Arab world that its millions are stampeding to the Christian infidel West, while very few Americans want to go to the "Holy Lands." Saying that Mr. Johnson had no business in Saudi Arabia is like saying that a million Arabs have no business in the American Midwest."

[snip]

"Once, the Belgians in places like Wiltz and St. Vieth were not complaining about Americans "exporting democracy" — when Panzers were stopped in their countryside from renewing their murderous work. They did not believe that America needed quickly to join the League of Nations instead, or that the next election in Germany would bring them a better reprieve.

And the tens of thousands sleeping under their white marble crosses in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg from the Meuse-Argonne to Hamm would not agree that had we only been more reasonable and less bellicose we would have been more popular and liked. You see, they would not concede that millions followed Hitler because it was America's fault in not offering the German people an alternative to barbarism. In fact, they didn't much care why Germany hated America, only how to defeat it and then — but only then — to guide it on a new path away from its savage past.

Indeed, if our dead could rise out of their graves they would surely rebuke us for our present blasphemy — shaking their fingers and remonstrating that bin Laden and his followers, both active and passive, are no different from Hitler and the other evil killers of their own age, who deserve to be defeated, not reasoned with or apologized to, and not understood. The voices of our dead abroad murmur to us, the deaf, that a nation is liked not by being good and weak or bad and strong, but only by proving both principled and resolute.

Sleep in peace, you ten thousand of St. Avold, and let us pray that we, the smug beneficiaries of your ultimate sacrifice, may still wake up from our own slumber."Read the Whole Thing