The Interregnum

Royal Family’s official Twitter account deletes controversial D-Day tweet that exposes disturbing historical revisionism of WWII

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9 June 2019|The Interregnum|Mohamed Elmaazi

The Royal Family’s Twitter account published a controversial tweet during the 75th D-Day commemorations. The ahistorical statement – which seemed to imply that the Germans were “allies” during the invasion – was deleted only hours later.

Featured image via Mohamed Elmaazi screenshot

On 5 June 2019 the British Royal Family’s Twitter account posted a short video clip of the Queen shaking hands with different world leaders as part of  the 75th D-Day commemorations. Less than than eight hours later, it was deleted.

Attempting to rewrite history?

While the tweet was deleted this author saved a picture of it before hand, and a copy was also saved in the Wayback archive. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is seen shaking hands with her ‘Royal Highness’.

Screenshot by Mohamed Elmaazi at 11:30am on 5 June 2019, before the Royal Family’s account deleted the tweet

Meanwhile, a representative from Russia is nowhere to be found. The implications of the whole situation are difficult to ignore.

Others also picked up on the rather odd nature of the situation:

Though some observers sought to rationalise the tweet, which they apparently considered well meaning and otherwise harmless.

Much more than a mere slip of the tongue

It would be easy to see this as little more than an odd distortion of reality, an accidental mischaracterisation of history during an official meeting of ruling class allies. But messages coming out of official state representatives are incredibly calculated. And in this case the entire situation – the presence of a German Chancellor and the lack of any Russian officials – reflects a wider  worldview that has been long in the making.

(Mis)Remembering the role of the Red Army

One day later Steven Pifer, a former US diplomat now with the Brookings Institution thinktank, put out a rather telling tweet:

Writer John Wight proceeded to castigat Pifer for the historically illiterate nature of his statement:

The Soviet Union played an outsized role in defeating Nazi Germany

In an OP-ED, published with RT on 7 June 2019, Wight explained that Operation Bagration (the “D-Day of the Eastern front”):

“began on 23 June along a 500-mile front, involving close to two million troops.”

He quoted British historian David Reynolds:

“In five weeks the Red Army advanced 450 miles, driving through Minsk to the outskirts of Warsaw and tearing the guts out of Hitler’s Army Group Centre. Nearly 20 German divisions were totally destroyed and another 50 severely mauled – an even worse disaster than Stalingrad.”

And notably:

“This stunning Soviet success occurred while Overlord was still stuck in the hedges and lanes of Normandy.”

The Soviets were the impetus behind D-Day

Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin ultimately agreed to the US and UK committing to Operation Overlord, after meeting in Tehran, Iran from 28 November to 1 December 1943.

Joseph Stalin, FDR, and Winston Churchill in Tehran in 1943

As the US government’s Office of the Historian put it:

“The Soviets, who had long been pushing the Allies to open a second front, agreed to launch another major offensive on the Eastern Front that would divert German troops away from the Allied campaign in northern France.”

In other words, the D-Day invasions happened because of both pressure and support from the Soviet Union.

24,000,000 military and civilian Soviet deaths

Journalist John McEvoy perfectly articulated this in a article published on 5 June 2019 entitled, “Trump’s state visit was marked by a shameless attempt to re-write history”.

Writing in The Canary McEvoy explained that:

“According to the National WWII Museum, the Soviet Union suffered 24,000,000 military and civilian deaths during the war; the UK, meanwhile, suffered 450,700, and the US suffered 418,500. The German army invaded the Soviet Union, and the Red Army was ultimately the first to reach Berlin. Even Winston Churchill, a Conservative with little esteem for the Soviet Union, claimed that it did “the main work in tearing the guts out of the German Army”.”

He took aim at statements made by the US president during the state dinner with the British Royals:

McEvoy argued that while the D-Day landings and liberation of Europe are “events worthy of celebration”, Trump’s implication that:

“it was the US and the UK alone which “defeated the Nazis and the Nazi regime” is not consistent with the facts.”

He also critiqued the Queen’s remarks:

“The Queen’s reference to a “hard won peace”, meanwhile, overlooks decades of US- and UK-sponsored post-war violence. It plays into an imperial imagination that, once the Nazis were defeated, the problem of foreign aggression largely became a closed book.”

Erasing the USSR as having contributed the most to defeating the Nazis

The result of years of propagandising regarding WWII is not without effect. McEvoy describes the impact that US cultural hegemony and fact-free historical revisionism has had on wider public perception.

For example, in 1945 just after the war,  57% of French polled believed that “the Soviet Union is the nation that most contributed to the German defeat”, with only 20% associating that with the US and 12% with England. By 2015 that had almost completely inverted with 54% of French believing the US contributed the most, followed by 23% associating that with the USSR and 18% with England.

Rewriting history in service of the Western ruling classes

It is within this context that the now deleted Royal Family’s D-Day tweet should be understood. Indeed, the fact that they deleted the tweet reveals that while many everyday observers remain oblivious to the implications of its message, those who are pushing these propagandising narratives are doing so with their eyes fully open.

Decades of Western state propaganda – against their own populations – is literally erasing the memory of the more than 24 million Soviet men, women, and children who were martyred defeating Nazism, while replacing that history with an Anglo-American supremacist fantasy. A rewriting of history that is, perhaps ironically, worthy of Stalin himself.

Down the “memory hole”

In George Orwell’s 1984 dystopia the totalitarian one party state of Oceana cherished the slogan[pdf, p313]:

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls
the present controls the past”

Reclaiming our history to take control over our future

If we are to chart a better future we must get to grips with our past. And doing so requires freeing ourselves from the cultural and historical hegemony that is maintained and perpetuated by our ruling classes, and their servants.

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