I’m trying to be more polite in my articles. Sometimes, however, I just can’t do it. Such is my attitude toward Gerald Vernon-Jackson, the phenomenally idiotic leader of Portsmouth city council in the United Kingdom.
On Tuesday, Vernon-Jackson attacked President Trump’s announced attendance at Portsmouth’s celebrations for the 75th anniversary of D-Day on June 5.
The D Day 75 commemoration we have planned was with the veterans meeting the Queen, probably for the last time. Now with Donald Trump coming this will become a day of controversy not commemoration, and an event open to everyone in Portsmouth will now have huge security barriers.
— Gerald VernonJackson (@geraldvjuk) April 23, 2019
Coming from a politician, there is great stupidity and grave dishonor in those words.
Suggesting that the democratically elected American president is not welcome at D-Day celebrations, Vernon-Jackson directly dishonors the hundreds of thousands of Americans who died for European freedom between 1942 and 1945.
But Vernon-Jackson also pollutes D-Day’s historical essence. After all, D-Day stands eternal not simply for what it achieved, but for what it meant in the moment of its action.
It meant that a great alliance was sending its young men to fight and die for the salvation of strangers. Remember, by June 1944, Nazi Germany’s power to defeat Britain and the United States was almost entirely depleted. Yes, that might have changed with the growing advent of Nazi rocket and atomic technologies. But in 1944, it would have been possible for the allies to establish a British fortress. They could have then used that fortress to send men, such as my British grandfather, to bomb the Nazis into submission, while men such as my American grandfather, tore apart the Japanese empire.
But that’s not what U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to do. Instead, they decided to risk young lives for something more: for freedom. D-Day, then, was the day when airborne and land divisions stormed across the British Channel to share soil with those they would soon free: the citizens of Paris and Metz; the Jews of Auschwitz; the peoples of Europe.
That is why I call Vernon-Jackson dishonorable. His words dishonor what D-Day and its successor operations cost to earn. They dishonor the nearly 2,500 Americans who gave their lives on D-Day, and the more than a thousand Britons, Canadians, and other allied soldiers who died with them on the five beaches.
But it is not enough to say that Vernon-Jackson is dishonorable. We must label him a fool. His knowledge of history is astonishing in its weakness. Recall how another just slightly better British politician viewed America in the darkest days of 1940, when Britain’s collapse to Nazism seemed imminent. Rallying his people to the fight, Churchill reminded them that if Britain was to fall, “the New World [America], with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old [the U.K. and France].”
Churchill trusted America, as does May, shown by her invitation for Trump to come to Portsmouth.
Vernon-Jackson only shames himself.
