Letter: We need another D-Day - a large-scale peaceful 'offensive' - to liberate hearts and minds from the tyranny of racism

A revamped fascist ideology has re-emerged from the shadows and the rubble of a crushing defeat in that most horrific of all wars.

In the weeks following D-Day, the advancing liberators encountered crimes against humanity that left them numb…despite all the horrors they’d witnessed on the battlefield. Let’s be clear about this: What they found at the camps was the result of racism unchecked.

It ought to have been a lesson to us all that humankind could not possibly forget. But the passage of time has eroded the searing truth revealed by the exposure of what men in fancy Hugo Boss uniforms euphuistically called the Final Solution.

We’ve all seen it in documentaries, or re-enacted in movies, and we still have those precious survivors of that dark time to attest that it really did happen.

Yet, it seems; hatred of one fellow human beings, because of skin colour or ethnicity; is still with us, and, unfortunately, thriving in certain districts and communities, though never calling itself publicly what it is. We need another D-Day… this time a large-scale peaceful “offensive”… to liberate hearts and minds from the tyranny of racism.

John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny