Seventy years ago today, the Allies emerged victorious against the Nazi/Fascist war machine in Europe.  We won because we put aside our differences to fight a homicidal and genocidal evil regime.  Today, most of those veterans are in their 90’s.  Soon, there will be few who remember first-hand how prescient and dangerous the Fascist threat to our liberty and democracy really was. We should remember and honor those who fought from that Greatest Generation.  We should remember also how close we came to being enslaved by an odioius ideology.

We wake up today at risk again from fascism, not the secular kind we fought in WWII, but one driven by a twisted version of Islam.  These fascist too are homicidal and genocidal.  They too want to replace our liberty and democracy with totalitarianism.  Unfortunately, like in WWII, we in the West are slow to take up arms against this threat.  Maybe because this one comes from a different part of the world, do we think we can take our time forming a cohesive resistance.  Perhaps it is because of the pace at wich our enemy attacks us; there is no blitzkrieg that quickly brings a constant threat to our doorstep.

This enemy hits our homeland not daily or hourly, but at a pace all their own.  New York, London, Madrid, Paris and others all hit– just not in a quick succession of strikes but spread out over a period of months and years.  Perhaps that explains our lack of urgency, the memory of the last strike fades before the next.

It’s not this way for our allies in the middle east, it is already October 1939 for them.  Now, no longer being able to wait for the West to rescue them, they’ve engaged the enemy on their own, with but token help from Europe and America.  This war will not be won quickly, if at all with this sense of urgency on our parts.  Like America in WWII, the war will eventually get here to a degree that it becomes the constant, immediate threat to the homeland, impossible to ignore.  We wait for the blitz, but so far we have only delayed it, not prevented it.  We’ll have to learn this the hard way the price of waiting…again.