And the International Wrong

"The British and the French will be there for the same reason—Central Europe in general and Poland in particular now have a large number of votes in European institutions and generally have to be taken more seriously than they used to be. Top-level U.S. politicians will presumably be absent because they, by contrast, have no special reason to take Central Europeans seriously. Generally speaking, the former Allies prefer to remember the bits of the war—D-Day, for example—that contribute to their memory of the 1945 Triumph of Democracy, preferring to forget that the war's initial raison d'être, the independence of Poland and the freedom of Central Europe, was not really achieved until 1989."

Anne Applebaum in Slate discusses today's commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of World War II.