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| Europe |
| D-Day for Revisionists |
| 2006-04-18 |
| A couple of weeks old (btw, I indeed was shocked by this documentary and the way it was promoted, so I didn't bother to watch it or buy the book it's based upon). Hat tip Erik Svane at No Pasaran, I missed it at the Transatlantic Intelligencer, my bad. See also the NP article on it. By John Rosenthal On June 6, 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, French President Jacques Chirac stood before hundreds of American veterans of the Allied invasion of Normandy at the American Cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where their fallen comrades are buried. Chirac pledged to the veterans that France had not forgotten their sacrifices. "To the entire American nation," he said, "...to all those men and women who paid the heavy price of those heroic days, I want to address the message of France: a message of friendship and brotherhood, of recognition and gratitude." And he continued: "Having experienced the long ordeal of war and occupation, France is aware of all it owes to the United States of America, to the commitment of President Roosevelt, to the actions of General Eisenhower. Each of us, every family in France, cherishes the memory of those moments of joy that followed the D-Day landings." Next up at the podium was President George W. Bush, who, recounting the course of events 60 years before, added a characteristic touch of levity to the ceremony: Near the village of Colleville, a young woman on a bicycle raced to her parents' farmhouse. She was worried for their safety. Seeing the shattered windows and partially caved-in roof, Anne Marie Broeckx called for her parents. As they came out of the damaged house, her father shouted, 'My daughter, this is a great day for France.' As it turned out, it was a great day for Anne Marie, as well. The liberating force of D-Day included the young American soldier she would marry, an Army private who was fighting a half a mile away on Omaha Beach. It was another fine moment in Franco-American relations. The reassuring words of the French head of state and the good cheer of the American chief executive were well-suited to the occasion. But they covered up a grimmer, more troubling reality: namely, a creeping historical revisionism that is part and parcel of the wave of anti-Americanism that has swept across Europe over the last five years. The Europe-wide dissemination of a book titled The Myth of the Good War: America and the Second World War provides some measure of the extent of the phenomenon. It has thus far been translated -- and always with the same title -- into German, English, Spanish, Italian, and French, apart from the original Dutch edition. Whereas such open revisionism concerning the role of the US in the liberation of Europe has hitherto been largely limited to "leftist" intellectual circles -- as well, of course, as neo-Nazi ones (who on this, like so many other points, are essentially indistinguishable from the former) -- in France it has now decidedly hit the mainstream. On Friday evening, March 24, French public television channel France 3 broadcast an hour-long documentary titled "The Dark Side of the Liberators." Morbidly turning the cheerfulness of George Bush's anecdote to derision, "The Dark Side" is about what it presents as the mass rape of French women by American troops in the aftermath of the Normandy operation. Rapes of English women by American soldiers stationed in the UK prior to the launch and then of German women, following the American crossing of the Rhine, are added into the mix -- seemingly in order to arrive at a more impressive number of cases -- as preamble and coda. With swing music in the background, and stock footage of the liberation -- the joyous celebrations of GIs and French civilians intermingled -- flashing across the screen, the voice-over begins: Normandy, June 1944. Filmed by the most famous Hollywood directors..., carefully selected by the cinematographic services of the US Army, these images of the American liberators legitimate a fervor long inscribed in the collective memory. ...One likes these soldiers, one admires them, one adores them. Heroic literature and films have immortalized the idyllic representation of the sons of the world's largest democracy come to liberate Europe from totalitarianism. Then the music changes, the upbeat swing giving way to an ominous, funereal march. "These images speak the truth," the voice-over allows, "but not the whole truth. "In what follows, "The Dark Side of the Liberators" does its part to dampen the grateful "fervor long inscribed in the collective memory" -- or even to transform it into hate. The narration talks of "atrocities committed": a formula that would usually imply that the acts in question were sanctioned by the military hierarchy and hence not a matter of simple crimes. A French historian interviewed for the film describes the American troops stationed in Cherbourg tenderly as "a veritable army of termites": "People are fed up. After a while, the French civilians can no longer accept that the Americans act like they're in a conquered land." German women are said to be subject to a "paroxysm of violence" even "exceeding that inflicted on the English and French." The individual cases discussed are apparently true. They are, after all, based on US court martial records from the time -- a fact that reveals that these are not, after all, a matter of "atrocities" in the usual sense of the term, but rather of crimes that were immediately recognized and prosecuted as such by US military authorities. The records were "uncovered" by an American academic by the name of J. Robert Lilly. Lilly is the hero of "The Dark Side of the Liberators". Among other reasons, this is because he found a French publisher for his book on the subject that no American publisher had been interested in bringing out. He is frequently seen in the film studiously pondering American military files -- a repeated image clearly meant to underscore his scholarly seriousness -- or posing embarrassing questions in a slow, deliberate English to an elderly French woman who gamely admits to having been one of the victims indicated in the records. But the issue, of course, is why do these sad cases merit such a sensationalized documentary treatment -- the film, in its own terms, tells a "story made of blood, sperm and tears" -- and why precisely now? The number of cases cited is based entirely on Lilly's say-so and his remarks leave no doubt that he is making extrapolations -- based on what calculus, the viewer is not told -- from the actual evidence. Even supposing the figures given -- some 3,500 "crimes" (both rapes and murders) for France and some "17,000 or 18,000" in all -- are not inflated, they are, regrettably, hardly exceptional in the annals of warfare or even in those of WWII. The narrator darkly repeats the number of 11,500 such crimes for Germany, rendered still more macabre by the fact that the victims are described as "women and children". But only seconds latter -- in an alibi-making flourish with which the film concludes -- she notes that French occupation forces in the single German town of Stuttgart are supposed to have been implicated in more than a thousand rape cases (Btw, I've read about theses, and the troops involved were mostly moroccans from colonial african army) and that the Red Army during the Second World War "was responsible for several hundred thousand" sexual crimes. (The latter number is presumably based on the claims of German filmmaker Helke Sander, whose highly controversial 1992 documentary on alleged crimes of the Red Army in Germany, "Liberators Take Liberties", seems indeed to have been the inspiration for "The Dark Side of the Liberators".) Why not, then, a film on the phenomenon in general? The narrator also mentions that "the German army" was guilty of "mass rapes" throughout Europe. Curiously, however, unlike for the three Allied nations, no specific numerical estimate or range is given -- as if the inclusion of the crimes of Nazi Germany was an afterthought or a matter of obligation. The very gesture of inserting the Nazi crimes -- and relatively inconspicuously to boot -- among the others, only serves to underscore the revisionist implications of the entire exercise. Were the liberators, then, no better than the conquerors? Maybe worse? For good measure -- and even though it works somewhat at cross-purposes to the principal charge of the film -- "The Dark Side of the Liberators" manages also to find the opportunity to accuse the American army of racism. It seems that a disproportionate number of black soldiers were implicated in the cases documented in the Army records. Lilly appears to take the documentary evidence at face value. The French directors, however, know better. The anomaly is surely the result of the fact that "the judges, prosecutors, and even the defense attorneys were all white in a culturally racist Army." The brief appearance in the film of a gravestone with the charming epitaph "Killed by the Blacks" ["Tué par les Noirs"] gives rise, however, to no similar interrogations about the attitudes of the local French population. John Rosenthal's writings on international politics have appeared in Policy Review, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes and Merkur. He is the editor of the Transatlantic Intelligencer (www.trans-int.com). |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #14 Ergo, Joe nails it once again! |
| Posted by: Inspector Clueso 2006-04-18 23:36 |
| #13 Once again the Right's 1-2 is undeniably, unconditionally, and absolutely equal or superior to the Left's 8-9 out of 10, ergo the Right and only the Right is the real problem for everyone. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2006-04-18 21:15 |
| #12 He was SM. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-04-18 20:28 |
| #11 Hope the French never need any help from the US. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-04-18 20:10 |
| #10 The French should try to sell this old whine to the East Germans. |
| Posted by: ed 2006-04-18 16:17 |
| #9 The real atrocity that occurred in France within days of the Normandy invasion was here. How well they forget these official acts. |
| Posted by: Slavique Elminetle5019 2006-04-18 15:54 |
| #8 I always figured that Grandpa was more like one of the guys in Kelly's Heros. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2006-04-18 15:48 |
| #7 Normandy, June 1944. Filmed by the most famous Hollywood directors..., carefully selected by the cinematographic services of the US Army, these images of the American liberators legitimate a fervor long inscribed in the collective memory. Yeah, the brass at the Pentagon [circa 2000] forgot all that. They didn't want to allocate any of their own resources, like their granddads did in WWII, to do the story telling. Ever see those films with the lead in "Approved by the War Office"? They 'contracted' out the work to MSM. Bites doesn't it? In moving slots from billets to bayonets they cut all the combat photogs. Seems they forgot the class back at the Army War College on Clausewitz - War is an extension of politics. Whether you like it or not, you have to play the game or even if you win all the battles at the front, you can lose the war at home. |
| Posted by: Thaitch Graviling3173 2006-04-18 15:45 |
| #6 As far as criminals who commited capital crimes in Britain, anyone who has seen "The Dirty Dozen" knows they redeemed themselves on D-Day. |
| Posted by: Penguin 2006-04-18 15:01 |
| #5 . . . . and the moon is made of green cheese. And non-french green cheese at that! |
| Posted by: Thrise Flasing4235 2006-04-18 13:33 |
| #4 We have the proof that mass rape never took place. If it had, today's Europeans would be half American, and therefore positive, upbeat, and industrious. They would indeed be a formidable force in business and technology, no doubt leading the world in various endeavors. They would possess a no-nonsence military and administrations who didn't tolerate bombings and riots. Need more proof than that ? |
| Posted by: wxjames 2006-04-18 12:11 |
| #3 So basically they are saying "Never rescue us again!" Nope, what they're saying is : the soldiers who liberated France were muslim (commeration of the Provence landing in 2005, with FLN president bouteflika invited, Algiers being given the medal of the résistance), not the accursed anglo-americans (Vichy term now again in use since GWII), the german soldiers were victims of the nazi regime and France and Germany are friends now (2005 D-day commemoration),... this is rewriting the past to serve present's day anti-americanism, as explained in the text. But this goes further : Europe's roots are as muslim as they are christian & Spain was originally a muslim country (or so sez Shiraq), WWI was won thanks to muslim troops (Shiraq inaugurated a - big - memorial for muslim soldiers at Verdun recently), the West's present prosperity is due to the work of migrants and to the exploitation of the colonized countries (believe me, THIS has been fully interiorized by the muslim population in Europe), migrants will help replenish our aging populations and pay our retirements (cf that socialist wimman happy in a tv "debate" that 30% of french births come from migrants),... This is an HEAVY trend. Eurabia. |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2006-04-18 11:38 |
| #2 So basically they are saying "Never rescue us again!" Deal. |
| Posted by: Laurence of the Rats 2006-04-18 11:19 |
| #1 It is NOT good military bearing to allow your soldiers to run around raping, pillaging, and plundering (unless you serve with John Kerry). Given we had a couple of million troops in Europe I would not be surprised to see a couple of thousand cases of rape. Using a figure of 2 million troops (I am guessing) and 18,000 rapes that leaves us with a .009% rate of criminal behavior. Yes there were bad people but the VAST majority of those who served did so with honor. This is just a leftist example of trying to find bad in everything good. Liberating Europe was a GOOD thing, bad things happened during that liberation, but the final tally was that Europe is no free. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge 2006-04-18 11:02 |