Hegseth is no Eisenhower
PLUS: Join Bishop William Barber and me TODAY at 12 pm ET
Eighty-one years ago, human civilization prevailed against human darkness.
The guns fell silent across Europe.
The camps killed no more.
The machinery of industrialized death was exposed to the world in all of its horror.
The Nazi empire collapsed beneath the weight of the greatest military mobilization in human history and the courage of ordinary men who crossed oceans, stormed beaches, liberated continents and saved civilization itself.
This anniversary takes place in a moment during which there are less than 50,000 surviving veterans of World War II and 196,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps. With each subsequent anniversary we will see a rapid decline in those numbers until, sometime soon, there are none left at all.
Humanity is crossing a threshold.
World War II is passing from lived experience into history.
The liberators are almost gone.
The victims are almost gone.
The perpetrators are almost all gone.
Soon, there will be nobody left who stood in the surf at Omaha Beach under machine-gun fire. Nobody left who parachuted into darkness over France. Nobody left who opened the gates at Buchenwald or Dachau. Nobody left who smelled the smoke rising from Auschwitz. Nobody left who watched Europe burn in real time, while civilization descended into mechanized barbarism.
Soon there will be no more unpunished SS men who murdered millions. They will stand shortly before the “supreme judge of the universe.”
That matters because memory disciplines nations.
The living witnesses, each a survivor of an event that killed four score of twenty million humans, imposed moral restraint on public life because they had seen the consequences of madness, fanaticism and authoritarianism with their own eyes.
They knew what fascism looked like.
They knew what total war looked like.
They knew the difference between courage and swagger.
They knew the difference between sacrifice and performance.
Now, they are leaving us.
The obligation falls to us.
To remember honestly.
To teach clearly.
To refuse the lies, distortions and vulgarity that always emerge when history becomes mythology in the hands of fools, demagogues and television performers.
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower issued a message to the soldiers, sailors and airmen preparing to launch the invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe:
The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.
He told them that they were about to embark upon “the Great Crusade.”
On May 7, 1945, a top-secret telegram announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany one week after Adolf Hitler’s suicide. There was no bluster, triumphalism or jingoism in the cable. Eisenhower’s words were spare, direct and to the point.
Those weren’t the words of a propagandist.
They weren’t the slogans of a television personality.
They were the measured words of a serious man.
The humility speaks for itself.
Eisenhower understood the weight of war because he understood the value of civilization itself.
Pete Hegseth does not, and neither does Donald Trump.
There is something profoundly obscene about watching a failed television personality and cosplay warrior invoke the moral grandeur of the cause of World War II, while presiding over the chaos, incoherence and strategic confusion of the Iran war.
Again and again, Hegseth has wrapped himself in the imagery and language of history’s greatest military generation.
He’s boasted about overwhelming American firepower. He’s declared that Iran is “toast.” He’s compared the campaign to the great demonstrations of American military dominance from past wars. He speaks constantly in the language of cinematic triumph, as though war were a Fox News graphic package instead of the most terrible undertaking human beings can unleash upon one another.
Most grotesquely, he invokes the spirit of the liberation campaigns of World War II — Normandy, the march across Europe, the destruction of fascism — as though this flailing catastrophe belongs in the same moral universe as D-Day.
It doesn’t.
D-Day wasn’t content creation.
Normandy wasn’t branding.
The Battle of the Bulge wasn’t a cable news segment designed for applause lines and social media clips.
The men who crossed the beaches at Omaha, Juno, Gold, Sword and Utah were part of one of the most sophisticated military operations ever conceived by human beings.
Operation Overlord was planned over years by serious men like Dwight Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, carrying the burden of civilization on their shoulders.
These men understood duty, sacrifice and consequence.
They didn’t cackle through congressional hearings.
They didn’t bluster when challenged.
They didn’t confuse propaganda with strategy.
They didn’t compare themselves to history, while failing to master the present.
The absurdity of hearing Pete Hegseth invoke the legacy of the men who liberated Europe, while presiding over strategic drift, mounting instability, diplomatic isolation and mounting death would be laughable if it weren’t so insulting to the dead.
The men of Normandy liberated Europe from tyranny.
Pete Hegseth serves a movement that worships strongmen, sneers at democratic allies, attacks the free press, and confuses swagger for courage.
The liberators fought against a cult of personality.
Hegseth works for one.
This is why remembrance matters now more than ever because, once the witnesses disappear, the charlatans rush into the vacuum.
They wrap themselves in borrowed glory.
They invoke the heroes, while betraying the values the heroes died defending.
They speak casually about war because they’ve never understood its cost.
The old men who saved the world are disappearing now into eternity.
What they leave behind isn’t merely memory.
It’s an obligation to defend truth against propaganda.
It’s an obligation to defend democracy against authoritarianism.
It’s an obligation to remember that civilization is fragile, that freedom is not inevitable, and that history’s darkest chapters don’t stay buried simply because we wish them to.
The generation that saved the world is leaving us.
The responsibility they leave behind is now ours.
It is jarring to read that man’s last name in the same sentence as Eisenhower. My uncle went in with Patton’s Third Army, fought a terrible slog over there and was awarded the Bronze Star. It troubles me that he is buried in New Jersey, as this country has lost every shred of its dignity.
Your post frightens and disturbs me, especially as a rabbi for 55 years. Our country and world are gripped in revisionism; especially questioning the reality of the Holocaust. Within too few years there will be no eyewitnesses; neither liberators nor liberated. Who will insure the voice of history? No one in this present Administration.