Dumbing Down D-Day

By: Andrew_McKillop

Darwin Couldn't Explain
If he was still alive, Darwin would have big problems explaining Dumbed Down D-Day. It wasn't natural evolution. It was probably “saltationist evolution” literally meaning an evolutionary leap – in the dark. D-Day ceremonies are laughed off by some, as antique or even pathetic, but that ignores their strange or bizarre evolution, showing that something else is happening.

Its difficult to know where to start, but we can try with the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II at the Paris Gare du Nord train station. She had a really antique Bentley shipped over from England – but the French also gave her a 1970s-vintage Citroen. Why that? The French media, and I mean all French media ran all-day coverage on the event, so we got to find out why. We were told it symbolized the era when French started admiring Swinging London and the Beatles and suchlike – only 10 years after they started singing. Only a few years after they disbanded!

French are supposed anti-monarchist republicans. After all they guillotined their last King and his comfort lady, the patron of Francois Quesnay, who informed Adam Smith all about the “real meaning” of the economy. Quesnay was a quack doctor practicing herbal remedies for syphilis among other things. So the anti-monarchic French ran all-day We Love the Queen themes. All her life was covered in hour-long documentaries. One or two talking heads actually said that France would love to have a Queen like her. Looking at Francois Hollande you can understand why.

Then we moved to The Beaches, to meet Obama and that Russian guy with a name like Putin. Our supposed enemy, but not today. The Beaches were a wondrous sight. French tourist agencies have tricked them out with “symbolic scenes of the war”, and you'd think that is normal, wouldn't you?

In fact they have American Civil War tent cities with models dressed up in whiskers and Stetson hats. They have horses and mules, and vintage rifles and cannons. You didn't know that D-Day meant that! Putin wasn't asked to ride a mule but he could have. Obama is better at golf although the French did not scenarize an 1860s-vintage American golf course for him. Maybe next year.

Guess Who Else Came?
Being an average ignorant person, I thought World War II in Europe meant the total defeat of Germany. So why does Angela Merkel come? She is uber-happy about Germany being totally beaten and destroyed? We have to guess. In any case she looked very happy and she even talked to that Putin guy, whose KGB-thugs occupied her Eastern Germany for quite a while. Supposedly, she wants more sanctions against Putin, but not on D-Day.

The French, being French, played a devious trick on themselves as well as everybody else. Hollande and his Mob had said they were absolutely not going to let Putin get away with acting normal and playing the role of a World War II Victor. He was occupying Ukraine, or almost doing that, so he was not a Victor. Therefore Hollande invited him to an evening “souper”, or supper-soup at the Elysees Palace, while others like Obama were given a midday meal. Very humiliating!

Hollande could have taken the pair of them out to one of the dozens of McDonalds in Paris to eat really modern “French” cuisine. French burgers are of course very special, we mean expensive. They could have all gone there in a 1970s Citroen, that would have been fun.

You could be surprised that Gay Pride also came along to commemorate D-Day. In Paris, when Queen Elizabeth II was running around in her strange cars, she was cheered – not jeered – by Gay Pridesters. On TV and radio they explained that the Queen symbolizes gender equality, but you may not have known that. French media went on to tell us this is so because her husband is only a Duke (of Edinburgh) while her retirement age oldest son is a Prince of Whales and Rainforests, and something to do with Cornwall.

He is also very worried about global warming, more precisely he worries about it stopping!

Obviously Hitler was a phallocrat, and it was only an accident of history which caused the Soviet Empire to fight Germany. Some (but not a lot) of the French media told us that Putin should not have been there, even if Italian and German leaders were there – to commemorate their own defeat! This is because the Second World War was a war for democracy and free markets, you only have to ask Obama and he will tell you.

Other Things You Didn't Know
French media, all French media, started about Thursday midday, and ended way after midnight Friday in a 36-hour D-Day media blast. So they had to be “nimble” with the facts and rich on legend.

You didn't know that 25-year-old footballers dance across the astroturf whenever they think about D-Day. In paid interviews with French TV channels they said that with wide-eyed honesty. Some, but not a lot of Paris bourse traders held an impromptu 1-minute silence for D-Day. After all it was the start of Free Markets and anyway they made up for the lost HFT time pretty fast.

You possibly didn't know that several thousand French are employed by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and some of them were churlish enough to say they would go on strike if their pay rates, frozen for the last 3 years, stay that way. They said that some of their Belgian colleagues had been forced to do un-catholic things like selling empty grave plots on the sly, simply to make ends meet. The interviewer actually said “But oh gosh you wouldn't go on strike during D-Day ceremonies, would you?”. The rest of the year we wouldn't give you one single minute of airtime!

French media also told us, with pride, about the Normandy shipbuilding and maritime industry – which is building two Mistral class “invasion platform” ships for you guess who, and training 400 Russian soldiers to operate them. A Russian general said that if Russia had had those ships in 2007, the invasion of Georgia would have taken “40 minutes not 40 hours”. Perhaps not surprisingly, Hollande did not want to talk about those ships – any other kind will do. So the media told us about gigantic cruise liners being built for Allied Powers “not far from The Beaches”.

As we know and saw, the Normandy tourist industry has really gone pedal to the metal with D-Day. Today you can go to an American civil war enactment scene, sit next to a Confederate or Yankee soldier, with whiskers, cleaning his rifle and maybe share a hot dog with him from the boiling billy can on his wood fire. There are also enacted landing scenes with sort-of reconstituted landing craft, which look suspiciously like retired fishing boats with some strange decking added. Of course there is a special area reserved for the British. They have Tommies with fish and chips and cups o' tea and a special museum where, with no surprise, there is the permanent Queen Elizabeth II throning scene of 1953. This was only a few years after D-Day, even if it was way after the American Civil War.

All in all, it was a great show – or was I dreaming?

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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