“Consider Page 1 of The New York Times [NYT] on June 7, 1944. The first sentence of its top story after D-Day reported that “the entire country joined in solemn prayer.”
Next to this story was a dutiful transcription of President Roosevelt’s national prayer: “Almighty God: Our sons have set upon a mighty endeavor . . .
“Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”
If President Bush had invoked the kingdom of the Almighty, today’s so-called liberals would have destroyed him. But in 1944, a Democratic icon prayed for salvation and nobody blinked.
The Times did not limit its discussion of prayer to the news side. An editorial run the same day said:
“We pray for the boys . . . we pray for our country . . . the cause prays for itself, for it is the cause of the God who created man free and equal.”
This is a far cry from the anti-Christian screeds that have come to dominate the op-ed pages of many American newspapers.
Liberal voices today try to tell us that the right side of the political spectrum has grown too rigidly conservative, “clinging to their guns and religion,” as Barack Obama put it so derisively on the campaign trail last year.
These liberal voices are lying.”
It’s instructive to see how prayer was second nature in those days.
And with the passage of time, and different types of history taught in schools, too many young people don’t know their World War II history. It’s good to have events such as today’s D-Day ceremony to instill some history in people.
Too many young people don’t know what D-Day was all about, or why it was so important in liberating Europe. So many young people, especially liberal young people who compared Bush to Hitler, don’t know about the real Hitler. They don’t know how Germany invaded so many countries so quickly. They don’t know how the Germany and the Axis powers were taking over Europe. They don’t know what happened at Dunkirk or about the Battle of Britain. They don’t know the courage of Churchill in rallying our British allies, especially during that time after the fall of France when Britain stood alone against the Axis.
And in the Pacific Theater, they don’t know the significance of the Battle of Midway. They don’t know about the Bataan Death March. They don’t know about Guadalcanal. They don’t know how, in the early dark days of the war, Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo inspired a nation.
But the world today was largely shaped by the events of World War II. Even if these days of moral relativism, we can proudly say that we were in the right in World War II, and that the world is a better place because the Axis powers were defeated. We can proudly say that we defeated evil in that war.
To those liberals who say today that “war never solved anything, war is not the answer” and all that, the answer to their question has to include the events of World War II. Good fought evil in that war.