Opinion | The Greatest Generation fought fascism. Let’s not forget their lessons.

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Five minutes from the Whipple Federal Building in the Twin Cities, where the Trump administration houses its machinery for incarceration and deportation in Minnesota, is the Fort Snelling National Cemetery. Here are buried many thousands of Americans from the “Greatest Generation” who served during World War II.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security is engaged in a different kind of war, as the Trump administration’s leaders term it. They say it requires militaristic action to defeat an “invasion” of immigrants supported by the “assassins” and “domestic terrorists” that have risen up in Minnesota to protect communities from federal assault.

The contrast between today and that past era, generations ago, is stark and alarming. It has a lesson for us.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has provided us with a good reference point, writing that in 1945, the War Department — so named because we then were actually at war — devoted one of its weekly educational pamphlets for our soldiers in Europe to the topic of “FASCISM!” Fascism, it warned, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social and cultural life of the state … . The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people … . Nor, once in power, is [fascism] easy to destroy.” The pamphlet described the tactics fascists use to try to come to power, noting the broad similarity to racism and fearmongering in our own country.

We must never forget that our Greatest Generation not only helped defeat fascism in Europe and beyond, but also worked to secure our own vibrant democracy here at home.

Some of the Greatest Generation’s leaders in war — like Harry S. Truman, George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower — then worked to build alliances among our friends, and to turn our adversaries into friends and even allies. Our soldiers fought and died, together with those of many others, in the United Nations’ defense of South Korea in the early 1950s.

In the past, our American presidents would never have insulted the soldiers of our allies. We honored them, as our allies still honor ours.

Our foreign policies were built around idealism, realism and, yes, self-interest — including our interest in a more peaceful world, where the rule of law was increasingly defined and applied not just at home, but abroad. NATO’s commitment to collective self-defense built the greatest alliance the world has ever seen. There was no hint that America would use military threats or diplomatic blackmail against our allies or others simply for narrow economic advantage such as access to mineral rights. Can you imagine Gen. Eisenhower demanding future economic concessions from the Free French before approving the invasion of Normandy?

The postwar struggle against communism was, like the fight against fascism in World War II, not simply a competition for power among the largest nations. It was also about ideas, ideals and, yes, compassion. The idea that we all, individuals and nations, best thrive when the poor, no less than the rich, live within the safety of civilized rules. While not without inequalities that weaken our democracy today, America and our citizens have prospered as we have worked to build that world since 1945.

We must not abandon that work, at home or abroad.

The battle is being fought by Minnesotans through organization, food banks, shelters and contributions to civil society. Heroes such as those who, in freezing cold, are picking up and returning home people who had been detained by masked, unnamed and armed federal officers. It is disgraceful that these are our government’s agents who are conducting roving patrols and sometimes recklessly unholstering their weapons, twice with fatal results.

Most Americans never imagined that the struggle for America’s free future would not only be against our adversaries abroad, but our government at home. Yet cameras held by peaceful protesters in Minnesota are making the stakes clear to us all. Today, it is Minnesota. Tomorrow, perhaps another state. Today, people of color. Tomorrow, perhaps people of a certain faith. Today, “liberal agitators.” Tomorrow, suburban independents who might vote a certain way.

The nation has been stirred and many are telling its leaders: Listen to the people of Minnesota, whose actions would make the Greatest Generation, like those buried at Fort Snelling, so proud. The ideas and ideals that inspired them so long ago may inspire our nation still.