Recall D-Day and Defend the American Spirit With Audacity

This photo shows the U.S. Army troops wading ashore at Omaha Beach in north-western France, during the D-Day invasion, on June 6, 1944. (Robert F. Sargent/STF/National Archives/AFP/Getty Images)

Commentary

On June 6, 1944, the United States and its British and Canadian allies launched a long-awaited invasion of the northern European mainland, landing on five German-held beaches in Normandy. The invasion came just two days after U.S. troops liberated Rome and nearly four years to the day after the British had fled the continent from Dunkirk to regroup and, ultimately, return.

At last, the Allies were on the offensive—and, less than a year later, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker in a Soviet-besieged Berlin and the war in Europe was effectively over.

The value of an audacious offensive is something long known to successful commanders. Alexander the Great, the most innovative general of his time and the path-setter for all who followed—defeated the mighty Persian army under Darius III at Issus and Gaugamela, destroying the Persian Empire around 330 BC. Mobility, innovative battlefield tactics, and a kinetic sense of combat saw the consistently outnumbered Macedonian Greeks conquer huge swaths of territory across Asia Minor and all the way to Afghanistan and India.

Napoleon, who worshipped Alexander, and George S. Patton Jr. both made the phrase “l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace” (audacity, audacity, always audacity) into their mottos, consistently surprising their enemies with unexpected mobility, esprit de corps, and a gift for tactical improvisation when it was needed. Most of all, however, they provided dashing leadership—something in seriously short supply in America these days.

No, we’re not in a shooting war—not yet, at least. But that’s just the problem: The Russians are hacking major American companies with impunity and the Biden administration just sits there, advising them to pay the ransom money and move on.

In Asia, the communist Chinese are busy building a navy (although China has never been a naval power, and its ability to project force is, historically, nugatory) and—having deliberately attacked the world with their manufactured novel coronavirus in Wuhan—are now making threatening noises about nuclear war if the West dares call them on it.

Meanwhile, the mullahs in Iran have resumed course toward developing a nuclear weapon now that Donald Trump is out of the picture.

Expect no leadership on any of these problems, from either the anti-American Democrats or the supine Republicans, however. The relentless beating that Trump took from the moment he was inaugurated to even after he left office has warned off the spineless GOP establishment that this, too, can happen to you.

On the Back Foot

Meanwhile, the “friends across the aisle” are employing their ideological stooges in the legacy media, for whom no lie is too outlandish to be believed, to demonstrate that truth no longer matters (Dr. Fauci, take a bow), and those who remain dedicated to it will be banned, deplatformed, banished, silenced, and even prosecuted.

Thus, Republicans and conservatives are always on the back foot, defending themselves against the institutional left’s constant assaults without ever mounting an offensive of their own.

Even during the fleeting Trump administration, what damage did the president and his often duplicitous team of backstabbers actually do to hinder the principal domestic enemy?

After four years of Trump, all the Democrats needed to do was win—by hook or by crook—a handful of states by the slimmest of margins and behold: The Electoral College that the Democrats have been complaining about for years as “undemocratic” handed them power.

Now, Trump’s executive orders and various projects are being summarily overturned—and with not a peep of complaint by the GOP-nominated judiciary. When Trump was in the White House, the Democrats could count on an obscure federal judge in the boondocks to instantly issue a nationwide injunction. Republicans? Crickets. It’s as if Trump never existed, except as a bogeyman with whom to frighten the women and children.

New Leadership

So, in the spirit of D-Day, it’s time to man up and fight. As patriotic Americans have been learning the hard way since the Clinton administration—and now once again, during what amounts to the third Barack Obama term—not all enemies are foreign.

Thanks to the malign efforts of the communist Frankfurt School, their pernicious doctrine of critical theory has been weaponized to divide Americans by race, and their “social justice” warriors are busily destroying the cores of major U.S. cities.

Their media minions, led by the race-obsessed New York Times and the Trump-obsessed Washington Post, relentlessly and maliciously attack the foundations of the country, while their enthusiastic promulgation of the COVID-19 hoax has resulted in more than a year’s worth of economic destruction, lassitude, an unseemly comfort with life on the dole for many, a cult of “safety,” and an outright fear of life.

If the left wanted to destroy America and the American spirit, how would they be acting any differently?

In point of fact, they do—and they’ve been making that quite clear for almost a century. Problem was, real Americans didn’t believe them. Americans are too nice, too kind, and too unwilling to think ill of their fellow man.

Pummeled into submission by the false “virtues” of diversity (which is really divisiveness) and “tolerance” (which the Frankfurt School’s point man in academe, Herbert Marcuse, aptly described as “repressive tolerance”), the American people have been rendered inert, to the point where they allow themselves to be browbeaten and threatened in their own universities and public forums—and just sit there and take it in the name of “fairness.”

What’s needed is new, fresh, and real leadership—a genuine crusade to seize back the country as founded from the ideological imports who would destroy the work of the Founders and turn the United States of America into a third-world state a la Mexico or the former USSR, in which a handful of oligarchs—the “nomenklatura”—lord it over a peasantry that nonetheless votes for them every chance they get.

“Toujours l’audace.” We owe the men who died on D-Day nothing less. For this is war, and the sooner everyone wakes up to that fact, the sooner a real leader of courage and conviction can emerge. And who might that be? I’ll have some thoughts for you—and some names—next week.

Michael Walsh is the editor of The-Pipeline.org and the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history from the Greeks to the Korean War, was recently published.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.