It’s 79 years since Allied troops landed on the Normandy beaches: Omaha, Utah, Gold, Juno, Sword. 160,000 troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily fortified French coastline determined to break Hitler’s hold on Europe. 9,000 died or were wounded that day. The number might be higher.

Today, 79 years later, D Day veterans made their way to the beaches for the last time. Old men with their memories. As Andy Rooney, a survivor of the fighting on Utah beach, reflected a few years ago, “It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people ever did for another.”

As the years roll by and one generation succeeds another, we lose the sense of the momentousness of World War II and of the D Day invasion. If you were to ask most people what D Day was, they couldn’t answer you. I wonder what these men would think of us with our race toward homegrown fascism. It hasn’t taken us long to forget the lessons of D Day and the sacrifices that were made in battles in cities and towns we struggle to pronounce.

If you have the privilege to talk with a World War II combat veteran, or a soldier who was there when the concentration camps were liberated, or family members sitting at home hoping the doorbell would not ring with a compassionate stranger bearing a telegram waiting behind the door, you will hear a perspective on fascism that knows it for what it is: the destruction of personal freedoms by a handful of people in power.

Eighty years later it’s easy to write off the Greatest Generation and relegate their opinions and memories to the ramblings of the old. That would be dangerous to deny their truth. It’s become easy to forget there was a time in this country when we all pulled together against a common enemy that murdered or imprisoned those who were not like them or who disagreed with them, burned books and art work that insulted their ideology, and who denied children the fundamental right to learn to think critically. That’s the legacy of Nazism: intolerance and suppression.

Today should be a reminder that we are in danger of prostituting our freedom to the hate of a few. Of falling for cruelty wrapped in the flag and packaged for consumption by ignorant men and women in power who refuse to learn the lessons of history. Or worse, deliberately ignore them.

If America, the America that landed with our Allies on that stretch of French coastline nearly eighty years ago, is to flourish we have to lay aside partisan politics, conspiracy theories, and the ideologies of hate. We are in danger of modeling ourselves on what we despised eighty years ago.