Germany as Victim

In postmodern Europe, D-Day is no longer just the liberation of Europe from the Nazis; it is now also the liberation of Germany. Turns out that Germans were the victims of World War II. Denis Boyles reviews the ridiculous journalism of France surrounding this year's D-Day commemorations.

Americans, as NRO's Cliff May told a skeptical BBC World Service presenter last week, are persistently forward-looking. Shrinks and analysts could give you reasons, but my hunch is that we look forward as a nation because we're driving the big global bus, and if we don't keep our eye on where we're going, we all take the big plunge.

Europeans, on the other hand, are passengers — and lousy ones. Think of a coachload of belligerent drunks, and you get the idea. Not only are they clueless about what lies ahead, but their preoccupations are entirely about what they think they've just seen. They forget that there are good reasons why they're not driving: most of which are scattered all over the road behind them.
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But last weekend, as the day approached, Schroeder and others began inflating the kind of idea that can only gain buoyancy in the artificial air of the new, improved Europe: The significance of D-Day for the Germans, he told RTL and others, was the liberation of all of Europe, including Germany, from totalitarianism. It's an idea that has been growing in popularity in Europe for some time. As this report in the Guardian shows, when you can adjust history to fit, you can even make Germans the victims of Germany, if you want.

So seeing D-Day as the beginning of German "liberation" had a certain excitement to it. The bizarre notion wafted like a mylar trinket above the heads of the press in Europe and America for day or two, as preparations unfolded for what is seen here as Bush's begging for European help in waging what he has successfully been able to characterize as an apologetic war. So, yes! Of course! Not only France, but Germany too had been liberated, according to this report in Libération, by the French resistance — and, okay, maybe with help from all those gum-chewing barbarians from America that l'Humanité was talking about. As I called around Paris on Monday, the idea seemed to have been greeted with a kind of awe. To a dark planet filled with the gloom of having to celebrate an American triumph, Liberated Germany was God's own light bulb. Why does war always have to have winners and losers? Can't we all be winners? "You must admit, it is a mature way of seeing things," one magazine writer told me.