In these days of…again…”Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” the so needed Disclaimer
Firstly, for consideration…”So You really think that if…“
“NEVER AGAIN!!” I swore over 40 years ago in 1980 as a boy of 12 between the far too many headstones at the huge American military cemetery in Normandy. During our holiday in France, when I insisted on visiting the D-Day landing sites and this cemetery, my mother and father told me. Intensely crying and sobbing. It became the mission of my life, my training, my task..still..almost every day, almost every hour…far too often…far too long…but I found it necessary and did my best.
This painting hangs above my bed and reminds me every day of my mission and pledge every day. Even in the regular moments when I wanted to drop out, badly frustrated by what was happening…wanted to quit altogether…so much people made in my opinion the same mistakes again…went along with wrong projects and wars again…but still continued on.
But if I return there one day, more then 40 years later, it looks like I will have to confess that my mission has failed. Europe is once again divided, in a hard Cold War with now bloody proxy war in Ukraine. New iron curtains are strengthened and expanded. Enemy thinking, hatred and demonisation are spread through the now modern much more extensive and powerful propaganda and disinformation channels and thus reinforced. Mass forming and hysteria follows, new form of Mccarthyism is back. Because our current leaders…American and British leaders in front… harshly and egocentrically rejected an inclusive undivided Europe…
So right after the flattening of the terrible and stressful years of our collective global corona pandemic and crisis they took their change…apparently nothing learned from that yet either.
I never thought then that…after more than 40 years of fighting for “NEVER AGAIN”, for peace and security and the European dream as I learned it and feel it deeply in my system…our current leaders, including those of all those then fallen and still mostly young Americans, would so betray their sacrifice.
What a sad day it will be…
RONALD JH ELZENGA 