Occasion of the Salute to the Liberators
The United States Holocaust Museum
Mandarin Oriental Hotel
Washington, DC
May 4, 2005
(As prepared for delivery)
Thank you for that kind introduction. I am confident I can speak for everyone here when I say it is an honor for us to be here with you the survivors and you the liberators - we are awed by your bravery, your patriotism and your humility.
I salute you soldiers out here tonight who fought and saved the world sixty years ago. Please stand up so we might recognize you and thank you.
As we sit here tonight, there are thousands of young men and women in uniform fighting for us in Iraq and Afghanistan. They too are American heroes and deserve a moment of silence to reflect on their courage and sacrifice and that of their families.
America's soldiers are the best and brightest that America has to offer and they make us all proud. People ask me everyday what can be done to bring our soldiers home. What I have to say isn't always popular, but it's the truth I know. The United States can, must and will win this war on terror. We owe it to the Armed Forces to demand nothing short of success from our civilian leadership. We need a strategy for success and the resources to get the job done and get our troops home. Not to cut and run, but to stay and succeed.
Our soldiers have been called in to action and placed in harm's way. They have been asked to sacrifice the normalcy many people take for granted. They are under-resourced; over-stretched; live in constant danger and they are fighting a war where the rules change daily. After thirty-four years in the Army, I know what each and every one of them is thinking:
"Thank God I have a chance to fight for my country."
Tonight as we keep today's soldiers and their families in our thoughts and prayers, we must take stock of the heroic efforts made by young men and women far from home in the days before jets; before cell phones and before the Internet.
Tonight we remember a world torn asunder by the forces of evil. So too we remember the men and women who cobbled it back together with the forces of goodness and decency.
By the spring of 1944, the world was on the brink of Nazi domination. Hitler's armies had crushed the major European powers and were poised to invade England. He was pushing the Russians back. It was a desperate time.
Then, on June 6th, D-Day, Operation Overlord landed over 133,000 troops from eight allied nations against Hitler's Europe. By June 30th more than 850,000 troops had landed on continental Europe. From the Normandy beaches in France to the Eagle's Nest high in the Austrian Alps, our fighting forces pushed fascism back off the continent.
The American troops were from small towns, big cities; farms and factories. They were Polish; Lithuanian; French; Italian; German; Hungarian. They were all Americans. The average age of these men was twenty-four years old.
Ten months after the invasion, on April 11th, 1945, elements of the 6th Armored Division of the famed 3rd Army Infantry were advancing through the German countryside when they came across a camp encircled with razor wire and outlined with guard towers.
They had liberated the Buchenwald. By liberated, I mean to say they discovered what the Nazis had abandoned. I mean to say they the people the world had abandoned. They were Polish; Lithuanian; French; Italian; German; Hungarian. They were mostly Jews.
This was the first camp discovered by the Americans that sought to implement the Nazi "final solution to the Jewish question is Europe" The arrest, deportation, internment and murder of six million souls in a Holocaust unlike the world had ever seen.
By the end of the war, fewer than 300,000 people came out of the camps alive. We have just completed the celebration of the biblical Exodus during Passover, commemorating the end of years of enslavement of the Jewish people. In the Haggadah, the liturgy of the Seder, most commentators agree that the central idea of the commemoration of the Exodus is the requirement that in each succeeding generation every Jew must internalize the Exodus, the experience of freedom-from-bondage, as though every Jew experienced it at the time.
So too all must internalize both the bondage and the subsequent freedom of the remnant that survived. Not that any of us can really understand the Holocaust - only the survivors have that understanding. But we can internalize survival - and we must.
Generals Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower toured the camp two days later and Ike said that if American soldiers didn't know what they were fighting for, at least now they know what they are fighting against. The Supreme Allied Commander ordered all commanders, reporters and photographers to the camps so that the world would never forget the evil done there. The message was clear from the top down: we must bear witness so this never happens again. Never again. Never again. Never again. Never again.
Ten years earlier, the United States government decided to close its eyes to the plight of the Jewish people. The ship, the St. Louis, holding Jewish refugees was denied port in Cuba and the United States and ultimately was sent back to Europe. People said it wasn't our fight because we would not support a war to save the Jews. As the fighting men in this room can tell you first hand, it became our fight. It became our fight because where there is evil, there must be goodness to fight it. The United States has always stood for goodness and it is our responsibility to fight evil.
Shamefully we did not long-remember the message. Joseph Stalin went unchecked as he murdered millions of men, women and children in his labor camps. Pol Pot killed an estimated 1.5 million of his own people in Cambodia. Idi Amin; Charles Taylor; Papa Doc Duvalier; Fidel Castro; Augusto Pinochet. Tyrants who slaughtered millions right in plain view while we told ourselves ‘never again'.
It was my duty, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, to witness what the news media called "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans. Now, I don't know what "ethnic cleansing" is supposed to mean but what I saw was neighbors raping and killing neighbors. Thugs and gangs calling themselves armies and officers carrying out the devil's own work against their fellow man. People they knew and didn't know. President Clinton ordered the end of the killing and raping, remembering our promise, our prayer of "never again." We put an end to the systemic slaughter of innocent people in the Balkans and we put Slobodan Milosevic behind bars.
Today we are still well short of our ideal, however. In the Darfur region of the Sudan, people are being slaughtered on the basis of their race. To date, our best public estimates read that more than 200,000 men, women and children have been killed, often with blunt force trauma or machetes. Can it be said by our children's children that we are keeping the promise we made in 1945? Will our legacy reflect the commitment the people in this room have to the end of genocide? That will be up to each of us.
We owe it to the people in this room, and all the survivors and liberators who sacrificed so much, to ask ourselves if it is OK to stand by while thousands are exterminated right before our eyes. We must ask ourselves why they don't deserve liberators of their own to someday salute. And when freedom of those now in bondage and suffering does come, we must internalize that freedom as though it was our own.
We are a mighty nation. We are strong as a country because we are strong as a people. You here tonight are among our strongest. To the soldiers, the survivors and the families of both, it is my honor to offer the heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation for your courage, your will to fight and the contribution you all have made to the success and the strength of the American people and the United States. Thank you all and God bless.
The Democrats are the party of generosity and compassion. Republicans are the party of greed and intolerance. Why, then, do we get our butts so roundly and soundly beaten in national elections? Are a majority of Americans greedy and intolerant? What can we Democrats do to increase our market share in America?
Social programs are like insurance. Insurance is basically shared pain. You get car insurance and the cost is spread out and shared by many policy holders. Social programs are the same. Many people contribute, and the pot is used by those who need it. Do we really want to be a nation that disregards our neediest citizens?
The problem is .... these needy citizens don't vote with any regularity. The selfish, the self-righteous, the religious zealots, and the gundamentalists do. This makes it very difficult to be progressive.
It sure seems like the Democratic Party has a death wish. No Northern Liberal has been elected President since 1960, and that was by one of the narrowest margins in election history. We continually nominate the McGoverns, the Humphreys, the Mondales, the Dukakis's, and, yes, the Kerrys. The winning Democrats have been southerners: Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Gore. Carter did lose reelection, and Gore lost the electoral vote. Gore might have won had he continued to fight and hadn't conceded to save the nation from an ugly ordeal. Who could have foreseen that Bush would take his lack of a mandate and proceed to try to destroy our democracy, and waste the lives of our soldiers in his Iraqi folly? If Gore had known, I'm sure he would have fought to the bitter end.
My support in 2004 originally went to Howard Dean, but shifted to Wesley Clark (a southwesterner) when he entered the race. I certainly wish he had entered the fray earlier, but he entered too late to be a factor. When the nominee was Kerry, I threw my support to him, but had the uneasy feeling that he would prove unelectable.
We MUST stop shooting ourselves in the foot. We MUST nominate someone electable. Bush the First was considered unbeatable when the campaign began so the northeast liberals stayed out of the fight. Clinton then defeated an increasingly unpopular president. Bush the Second was considered vulnerable, so we nominated a northern liberal.
You CAN support our troops, but not Bush's war.
You CAN love America and dislike Bush's policies.
It's OUR flag, too.
We MUST nominate someone electable. General Clark is electable. The northern far left are already announcing for 2008. I think Hillary Clinton is a fine candidate, and an exceptional Democrat, but she is probably unelectable at the top of the ticket.
Please announce your candidacy soon, General. We need you.
Don Cain
First Sergeant, USA
Retired
don.cain@gmail.com