Francisco Lobo
On the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast, US President Joe Biden reminded his European allies gathered in Omaha Beach the reasons why his and their forebears undertook this gallant feat of arms eight decades prior: ‘To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches’. What happened there exactly? A lot of American soldiers, as well as fighters from other nations including the UK, Canada, and France, stormed the beaches of Normandy in order to breach the impregnable ‘Fortress Europa’ lying behind Hitler’s Atlantic wall. They succeeded at an enormous human cost, but ‘Operation Overlord’ would go down in history as one of the largest, most successful, military actions on record. Furthermore, D-Day brought about something in addition to the beginning of the end of World War II. Something else happened in those ‘hallowed beaches’ that would define our lives to this day. It was the tangible consolidation of the normative commitment that the Allies had vowed to uphold a few years before with the Atlantic Charter of 1941.
In characteristically praeter-colonial fashion as they had to accommodate the colonial and the post-colonial in the same declaration of principles, the Allies committed to political freedom, self-determination, free trade and freedom of navigation, and a lasting peace made possible first by disarmament and, more importantly, by ‘a wider and permanent system of general security’ (NATO 2018, para. 15). Such a system would come to be known as the United Nations, founded a little over a year after D-Day and one of the most salient legacies of World War II.
Almost a decade later, in 1954, an acclaimed writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, William Golding, would publish his famous novel Lord of the Flies (Golding 2023). His notoriously realistic portrayal of human nature as a deposit of savagery and cruelty buried under a thin veneer of civilization waiting to come out at the first opportunity has become shorthand for chaos and pessimism about the prospects of peace among people (Bregman 2021). Like Sawyer, the folksy redneck from the TV series Lost, remarked ominously as he waved a knife at another man: ‘Folks down on the beach might have been doctors and accountants a month ago, but it’s Lord of the Flies time now’.
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