A Toll of Millions, Both Gone and Yet to Die

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

I got an E-mail from John Crawford of England not to long ago. It included a picture of a quiet field near a small village. Back in June of 1944 that field was not so quiet. Men struggled, killed, and yes died on the field. It was not pretty or picturesque then, but a place of horror.

Some will think of this and say "war is terrible and a waste, so we should not fight at all."

War is terrible, and it is wasteful, and the problem is that it is too easy to see the horror and the waste and not the consequences of failing to fight.

The allied invasion of Europe and defeat of the Nazi regime came far too late for millions of innocents.

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq also both came to late for uncounted millions of people. Turning a blind eye to evil only allows it to fester and grow.

But turning a blind eye is so much easier to do. Seeing the future consequences so much harder, and some just find it easier to ignore the lessons of history and the blood that has been spilled.

Churchill complained that the West failed to strangle communism in its crib at the end of World War I. That failure left millions dead in the Soviet Union alone. More millions died in China, Cambodia, North Korea . . . the list goes on. Millions more are going to die in the name of that ideology, because when it mattered, the easier road was taken and millions were condemned to the darkness that followed.