Virtue Triumphant

Tomorrow's date looms large in Gove History™, as the seventieth anniversary of the day when Winston Churchill invaded Normandy and, with the assistance of a few Americans, commenced the liberation of Europe from some friends of Lord Rothermere. Strangely enough, not everybody sees it that way. The Germans, for example, are far more interested in the eastern front; a perverse if post-communistically excusable perspective which they share with the Russians and, in all probability, the Poles, Ukrainians and the modern Conservative Party's chums in the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club. For their own part, German chancellors have only recently started attending the D-Day celebrations ("commemorations" to lesser breeds), and have been careful to avoid any gesture which might be interpreted as honouring SS troops. Germany is a major provider of arms to Israel, the Righteous State in whose existence, as the noted historian Steven Spielberg informs us, the Holocaust is redeemed; it would be embarrassing if so ethical a connection were to be compromised by association with military aggression and racial murder.