Mersea Island Courier June 2024
Earlier this month as a nation we commemorated D Day. D Day was something to be commemorated, rather than celebrated – thousands of people lost their lives that day. But what it is we are actually commemorating? I would suggest that it is about democracy.
When the Nazi dictatorship gained power in Germany and then invaded other European countries – Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France – and then the British Channel Islands - what they were doing was replacing democracy with dictatorship. The immediate consequence was a massive loss of freedom – those who criticised the government were arrested, government sponsored mobs beat up political opponents – and then came the concentration camps and the holocaust…
What D-Day did was to restore democracy to those countries – and to permanently remove the threat to Britian of a Nazi invasion and dictatorship here. That is why both on 6 June and in church services the following Sunday we honoured the 129,400 allied troops who landed on the D-Day beaches. They didn’t just secure democracy for us – the right to vote in or out the government of our choice. They also secured the freedoms that democracy brings with it – freedom of speech – including the freedom to criticise the government or any other group without fear of arrest, freedom of religion, the right to fair trial and equal treatment of everyone by the law. Those are things that really matter.
But democracy is fragile. In 2005 as an aid worker in Afghanistan I had the privilege of visiting an election tent as that war torn country prepared for its first elections after years of tyranny by mujahaddin warlords and then the Taliban. People were so excited. I still remember candidates coming in dressed to the nines in their best clothes to register as candidates. Tragically, as we all know it didn’t last. President Trump’s deal with the Taliban, followed by President’s Biden’s withdrawal of US troops in 2021 led to the replacement of an imperfect fledgling democracy by Taliban tyranny not wholly dissimilar to that in Nazi Germany.
More recently, in February 2022 we saw Ukraine – a fellow European country which had only been a democracy for around 30 years, brutally invaded on the orders of Russian President Putin. It was a blatant attempt to annexe a free democratic European country and make it part of Russia – without the Ukrainian people being allowed to decide their future at the ballot box.
So, yes voting really does matter.
So, in the general election on 4th July, please remember that in 1944 4,414 people died on the beaches of Normandy, laying down their lives to give us those freedoms.
So, HOWEVER YOU VOTE – PLEASE VOTE!
Dr Martin Parsons is a Colchester City Councillor for Mersea and Pyefleet and a former aid worker in Afghanistan
When the Nazi dictatorship gained power in Germany and then invaded other European countries – Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France – and then the British Channel Islands - what they were doing was replacing democracy with dictatorship. The immediate consequence was a massive loss of freedom – those who criticised the government were arrested, government sponsored mobs beat up political opponents – and then came the concentration camps and the holocaust…
What D-Day did was to restore democracy to those countries – and to permanently remove the threat to Britian of a Nazi invasion and dictatorship here. That is why both on 6 June and in church services the following Sunday we honoured the 129,400 allied troops who landed on the D-Day beaches. They didn’t just secure democracy for us – the right to vote in or out the government of our choice. They also secured the freedoms that democracy brings with it – freedom of speech – including the freedom to criticise the government or any other group without fear of arrest, freedom of religion, the right to fair trial and equal treatment of everyone by the law. Those are things that really matter.
But democracy is fragile. In 2005 as an aid worker in Afghanistan I had the privilege of visiting an election tent as that war torn country prepared for its first elections after years of tyranny by mujahaddin warlords and then the Taliban. People were so excited. I still remember candidates coming in dressed to the nines in their best clothes to register as candidates. Tragically, as we all know it didn’t last. President Trump’s deal with the Taliban, followed by President’s Biden’s withdrawal of US troops in 2021 led to the replacement of an imperfect fledgling democracy by Taliban tyranny not wholly dissimilar to that in Nazi Germany.
More recently, in February 2022 we saw Ukraine – a fellow European country which had only been a democracy for around 30 years, brutally invaded on the orders of Russian President Putin. It was a blatant attempt to annexe a free democratic European country and make it part of Russia – without the Ukrainian people being allowed to decide their future at the ballot box.
So, yes voting really does matter.
So, in the general election on 4th July, please remember that in 1944 4,414 people died on the beaches of Normandy, laying down their lives to give us those freedoms.
So, HOWEVER YOU VOTE – PLEASE VOTE!
Dr Martin Parsons is a Colchester City Councillor for Mersea and Pyefleet and a former aid worker in Afghanistan
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