CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Beached Arguments: Pete Hegseth, JD Vance and European Immigration

Photograph Source: U.S. Secretary of Defense – Public Domain

Waxworks have nothing to say, but when incarnated in the form of former Fox News anchor and, at a pinch, “personality”, Pete Hegseth proves to be a marvel of sheer stupidity. It’s not that one cannot be provocative on matters of discomfort, teasing the political consciousness and prodding the sensitive. Immigration, and what makes it up, is a point of energetic disquiet in Europe, and a figure insisting on raising it is bound to add a spoke to the news cycle.  But to do so in the fashion of the US Secretary of War, as he likes to be known as, was something else.

The speech, given at the Normandy American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, was to commemorate the Normandy landings of June 6, 1944 to liberate Western Europe from Nazi German occupation. “Eighty-two years ago today, the survival of Western civilization hung in the balance.  Dark forces had swept across Europe.  Hitler boasted that his [coastal defensive] Atlantic Wall was impenetrable.   But our enemy made a fatal miscalculation: they underestimated the unbreakable will of the American fighting man”.

He was not to confine himself to the heavily accented theme of American greatness.  A contrast was in the offing.  Western nations had become comfortably and dangerously complacent.  “We forgot that freedom is not free.  We forgot that peace is not wished into being.  It is bought with purpose, with honor and with strength.  The men who landed on these beaches knew this; the question we ask ourselves is, do we?”  Examples of such complacency and wilful amnesia were offered.  “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” he declared darkly.  “Beaches in Spain, in Italy, in Greece and Bulgaria.  Boats and men arrive.  When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

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