From the beaches of Normandy to blood on the streets of Beijing

This Green and Surprisingly Peasant Land reflects on the lessons of D-Day

Celebrations have been wound up marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, signalling the beginning of the Nazi defeat.

This was a great victory for the Allied forces and so it is clear why celebrations were held but you really have to love a nation that also revels in defeat of the kind marked in Britain by anniversaries of the 1940 Dunkirk retreat, a moment when it looked as though the Nazi advance in Europe was unstoppable and Britain’s best option was to get its troops out of the way.

The withdrawal from Dunkirk is rightly seen as more than a military manoeuvre because it marked a significant moment when ordinary citizens played their role in rescuing Allied troops. Some 700 small boats headed off to the French coast to take part in the rescue. This was impressive but the reality is that most of the vessels involved in this operation were warships. Moreover the retreat left some 4,400 Allied troops dead and a larger number, almost 6,000, wounded or declared missing.

On the face of things there was not much to celebrate, yet on this day the ‘Dunkirk spirt’ was born. A spirit of defiance regardless of risk.

A citizens mobilisation of this kind is inconceivable in countries under authoritarian rule. The rulers would never trust the people and are wary of individual initiative that might allow events to slip out of their control.

Britain, like other democracies, has to trust its people and has a system to ensure that the rulers are accountable to the ruled. Thus even in the midst of war the UK maintained an impressively high degree of liberty despite the imposition of martial law granting exceptional powers to the government. Parliament continued to function and MPs regularly criticised the conduct of the war.

Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, allied with Britain in the fight against the Nazis but not in the pursuit of liberty, Stalin’s Communist Party took the opportunity of war to tighten its control over citizens. Never more so than during the siege of Stalingrad where the death and casualty rate was appalling.

Losses were multiplied as the Soviet leadership showed a monstrous disregard for human life. Stalin’s coterie in Moscow was focused on control from the centre and disregarded intelligence and advice from those on the ground.

Piling on the horror during the siege was the constant activity of the secret police and party officials who were diverted away from fighting the Nazis to rounding up and eliminating anyone suspected of defying the party line or acting in defiance of orders, some of which bordered on the insane.

This callous attitude to human life is not incidental but at the heart of how dictatorships behave because they are inherently paranoid and devote huge amounts of time and resources to hunting down real or imagined enemies among their own people.

Leaders who spoke at this month’s extensive D-Day commemorations reflected on the importance of  restoring freedom to Europe. So this is a fitting moment to revisit the issue of liberty.

Those of us fortunate enough to be living in democracies do indeed have something to celebrate and  freedom of expression also allows us to freely discuss history without having to adhere to the kind of constant rewriting of history so beloved of dictatorships who are determined to get the narrative of the past to fit their political needs.

Look at how China’s dictatorship interprets the 4 June 1989 massacre of democracy protestors in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Discussion of the massacre is supressed although the Communist Party permits passing reference to an ‘incident’ and stresses that it came about because of foreign meddling.

Hong Kong used to be the only place on Chinese soil where the victims were honoured and there was freedom to speak about the massacre. But now the smallest flicker of commemoration incites instant arrest by the local authorities armed with a new batch of laws that effectively criminalise any form of history that does not accord with the official line.

Thus the burden of being witness to history has fallen on the fast growing Hong Kong diaspora. While other British people were remembering D Day, ceremonies were held throughout the country to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre and mourn the loss of liberty in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong diaspora’s freedom to mark this day helps explain why Hongkongers have acquired such a strong attachment to their new homes.

It is also a reminder to British people never to take freedom for granted. It’s no small thing not having to face the prospect of a pre-dawn knock on the door as members of the National Security Police pour into your home to search and arrest. Yet this is the reality of Hong Kong today.