No. of Recommendations: 12
Today marks the conclusion of the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. More than 700,000 soldiers fought for the Allies during the 41-day battle. The U.S. alone suffered some 75,000 casualties that took the lives of 19,000 men, fighting throughout that bitter cold winter against fascism, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy.
German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it. Sounds familiar, eh?
Then, the Allies prevailed and defeated fascism.
After World War II allied nations created the United Nations, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act to fund higher education for former military personnel. The Communicable Disease Center opened its doors and was later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Malaria was eradicated in the Deep South, then rabies and polio and, by 1960, the spread of influenza and tuberculosis, as well as smallpox, measles, and rubella was slowed, if not stopped. Congress invested in the nation’s infrastructure with projects like the Interstate Highway System. President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948. Congress expanded recognition of those rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Today, under the new Trump administration, incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a halt to almost all foreign aid. President Donald Trump is demanding that NATO members increase military spending to 5% of their nations' economies despite the U.S. falling short of that goal by $567 billion a year.
As Heather Cox Richardson writes:
Trump has undertaken to dismantle the postwar democratic government at home, too. He has stopped the funding for repairing roads, bridges, airports, and ports that passed Congress in a bipartisan vote in 2022, as well as taken away funding for new solar manufacturing plants and other new systems to address climate change.
He has frozen all travel and communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” one researcher told Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Mark Johnson of the Washington Post. “This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.”
And, of course, Trump has declared a war on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In his revoking of LBJ’s Executive Order 11246, itself based on FDR’s Executive Order 8802, he explicitly rejected the principles for which the Americans fought in World War II.https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/januar... 