Today is Bevrijdingsdag, Liberation Day, in the Netherlands. This follows Dodenherdenking, Memorial Day, on which the entire country goes silent for two minutes in memory of Dutch civilian and military deaths in war or peacekeeping missions during and since World War II. Tens of thousands of people gather in Amsterdam and elsewhere around the country to commemorate the occasion; veterans are honored in solemn ceremonies; speakers evoke memories of World War II, and implore everyone never to forget what happened in Europe in the 20th century.
Taking time to think about Liberation Day, either in a national or individual sense, is an important experience in two ways.
First, it is a reminder to be thankful for the most important of all of what you have--freedom. Freedom from oppression, freedom from fear, freedom to live your life and have an equal say in the determination of your own and your society's future. There are still a great many people alive in Europe that can remember what it was to be in countries were conquered and briefly oppressed by the Germans during World War II. Adults from this period are dying off rapidly, but there are still many, many people who were young enough to be still alive but old enough to remember what this was like. Of course there are photos and stories, but even the bare terminology--things like "the Hunger Winter", is evocative enough that most people appreciate and respect what this experience was for those who lived it, and it still resonates today.
The second way in which this is important is that it is a humbling experience. To be liberated, you necessarily have to have been conquered. You must have surrendered, you must have submitted to the will of other evil people. You must have lived each day burning with hatred and angst and guilt at having given up, at not putting up more of a fight. And in the end, you owe your freedom, your life, to another, greater power.
Of the two, I think the second is the most formative. To be humbled in this way is to experience all the sickening emotions a human can feel, and yet come out at the end with a purpose, an ideal. The humility that World War II brought to Europe is, I think, the single most important influence that has led to the way in which Europe and America are now diverging on how best to approach the world's problems.
Europeans know first hand what happens when the animal impulses of armed, threatened, vengeful men are let loose. They still think about it in their own cultural and historical context. They identify with it, perhaps not personally, but the societies that were rebuilt from the ruins of World War II were constructed on one foundation: never again.
Americans have a different story. We fought for our own liberation, and we kicked their ass. And when Europe needed liberating--TWICE--who else was going to do it?
This is not to denigrate or belittle the sacrifices Americans made to free ourselves, build the first successful democracy in the world and liberate millions from the tyrannies of 20th century fascism. But how do we commemorate this? How do we, as a society, memorialize it? How do we evoke memories of the sacrifices, the courage, the tragedy, for those who weren't alive to witness it? And most of all, how do we show that we have learned something from all of this death and sadness, that somehow we'll avoid making the same mistakes?
I don't know that it's possible. It doesn't resonate anymore, except for the people who lived it. No lesson was handed down--the prosperity of postwar America has been abused and squandered, so that we are a debtor nation in search of a purpose other than making more money.
What we miss is the humility.
It is the curse of our catastrophic success. The obvious consequences of that luxury are Abu Ghraib, the 'liberation' of Iraq where 30 civilians die each day, Guantanamo Bay, the arming of Saddam, Vietnam. The not so obvious consequences are even more insidious--extraordinary rendition, our cozy relationship with countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our good cop bad cop routine with countries like Kyrgyzstan, where our detainees get boiled alive.
Sure there are bad people in the world, and they need to be dealt with. But only a fool or an ideologue will argue that every one of the hundreds of thousands of deaths we've caused through wars, proxy wars and the arming of belligerents has been for the greater good. And fifty years of realpolitik has turned us into a nation of people six degrees from the torture chamber.
We have inured ourselves to the evil of these actions because they are alleged to have occurred in far away places we've never heard of, committed against people we neither understand or care about and have never heard of. We cannot bring ourselves to consider them, in the belief that they are impossible because we are a good people and we are incapable of such despicable, disgusting things. But however we justify them to ourselves, these things are occurring every day in all of our names.
I used the think from time to time how lucky I was to have been born healthy and free in late 20th century America. I could have been 4 billion other people, and I only had about a 4% chance of coming into the world in the richest, most powerful country on earth. How come I didn't end up in Beirut?
I don't know what it will take to bring enough people around to the understanding that these actions are evil and that it is only an accident of biology that they are the mindless, indirect perpetrators of these crimes instead of the hapless victims, waiting to be liberated.