The New Occupation of Europe

How exactly did we get here? The United States has been fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq (yes, we still have troops fighting there) for 15-plus years. Those troops are saddled with more rules of engagement than you can shake a stick at (at least they were under Obama; perhaps that has eased somewhat).

For some reason, Hollywood leftists love, or pretend to, "the Greatest Generation." But if you watch either of the excellent HBO miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, you'll see that by today's standards, by which the left judges all history and historical figures (see the desecration of Confederate monuments in the South and the ongoing attempt to denigrate the Founding Fathers, many of whom were, after all, slave-owners), most of the characters in those television series would be tried and convicted as war criminals in some absurd "international court," probably in the Hague. In fact, FDR and his successor, Harry Truman, would, again by the left's standards of today, be branded as two of the biggest war criminals in history, right alongside Hitler – FDR for his campaign of "total war," which included the area bombing of many German cities and the firebombing of most Japanese cities, including the March 12-13 raid on Tokyo, which killed over a hundred thousand people, mostly civilians, and, of course, Truman for unleashing hell on Earth, not once, but twice, in the form of two atomic bombs, the only man so far in history to have ordered the use of nuclear weapons. The irony is that had FDR and Truman fought World War II the way current leaders are forced to fight modern wars, the so-called International Criminal Court would not have been established in the Hague because the Netherlands would probably still be under Nazi occupation, and the Dutch would not have had the chance to atone for colluding with the Nazis and sending almost every single Dutch Jew to his death in the concentration camps. More than twenty thousand Dutchmen did, after all, join the Waffen S.S. Must be something in the water there. To demonstrate how much things have changed in the last seventy years, today, much of Europe, particularly Western Europe, is again under enemy occupation, yet those countries did not fire even a single shot in their own defense (okay, so things have not changed that much in France). Not only has Europe capitulated to this new conqueror, but many countries have made it illegal to even criticize the enemy or to point out that he is, in fact, the enemy. And who, pray tell, is this new enemy? Militant Islam, jihadists, Muslim terrorists, whatever you want to call them – as long as you don't call them that in Western Europe, because you will likely be arrested for it. They are bold in their intentions, marching down the broad boulevards of Europe's capitals, with police protection, bearing signs and banners that say things like "Kill those who insult Islam," "Islam will dominate the world," and "Be prepared for the real Holocaust." They mean it, quite literally, as evidenced by the frequent slaughter of innocent people around the world every single day. And for you apologists and moral equivocators, these acts are not the random violence of lunatics or otherwise mentally deranged individuals; this is a highly organized worldwide campaign with tens of millions of followers, millions of whom not only support the creation of a worldwide caliphate and the imposition of sharia law on the rest of us, but are willing to kill and to die to see it happen. Interestingly enough, while the jihadist marches calling for beheadings and death are accepted as freedom of expression, counter-protesters who call for stricter laws are always branded as racists and Nazis. So my question is, between World War II and now, what the hell happened?