D-Day anniversary approaches: French vow to down planes

It's just bizarre, truly bizarre. In a hilariously sad twisting of historical events, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day (Sunday) there will be a no–fly zone over Normandy. France has been raised to its second–highest state of alert since there’ll be world leaders there, and has vowed to shoot down any plane which flies over the region. Here’s a snip from the BBC:

Some 9,000 troops are being deployed in the northern region, and any planes violating a no–fly zone in Normandy will be shot down, the military warned.

Surface–to–air missiles have already been installed along the coastline.

A host of world leaders, including US President George Bush, are to attend the weekend WWII anniversary event.

Among the guests will also be Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder — the first German leader to be present at such an event.

I’ll skim over all the objections I have to this distasteful flocking of grandees: Veterans and their families will face a hell of a time getting near the area (for the first time in 60 years, no less); townspeople and villagers will not be able to leave their homes in some towns on the day itself (hmm, there’s another twisted mirror); that Bush and Blair will be there is, to put it mildly, a gross affront to the essential and discrete sense of remembrance and dignity which should attend such an anniversary; since in another ten years’ time there will be only a handful of veterns left, this anniversary should be about them, not present-day world leaders who have *chosen* war over peace rather than been truly compelled by a genuinely nasty worldwide imperative.

America, like Britain, has mythologised its own version of the second world war. Both nations have internalised their own myths to such an extent that they now have to make a determined effort not to see the modern world through a false glass. In spite of our 1940 myth, Britain does not stand today alone against Europe. In spite of its 1944 myth, America is neither the world’s only hope of freedom nor seen as such by other nations.

This weekend, a wartime president will stand where a peacetime president stood a decade ago. Perhaps he will rise to a little humility in the face of 80–year–olds who learned the hard way what war is and what it is not. But don’t count on it. Bush is unlikely to ask the veterans what they did right and he did wrong. More probable, as Simon Schama put it last week, is that the man who has waged a really bad war will again eagerly invoke the reassurance of the Good War. It is absolutely the wrong lesson.

Like Martin Kettle (article quoted above originally in The Guardian but for some reason I can’t reach the site right now), I’m cringing at the thought.