There’s been some discussion–elsewhere–about the fact that Google doesn’t change its icons to celebrate or memorialize American holidays, such as Memorial Day or D-Day.

I mostly ignored this, but one discussion got me thinking: Yes, Google is an American company, but it has an international audience, and as such I don’t see why it is expected to memorialize all American holidays–especially when those holidays may be viewed quite differently in other countries. In fact, a Russian friend commented that in Russia D-Day is viewed as the day the Americans finally got off their butts and joined the fight.

If you think about WWII, one of the pictures that may come to mind is of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta summit. Sometimes Americans–especially those who lived through the Cold War, try to forget that the Russians were our allies in WWII. German, Japan, and Italy were the three Axis countries during WWII, and those were the three countries we were fighting. So of the six top powers of WWII were Britain, the USSR, the US, Germany, Italy and Japan.

It seems to me that celebrating D-Day on an international scale is akin to taunting those who lost, as well as the many Soviet citizens who had been battling the Axis long before the Americans joined in.

Please note, I do believe that D-Day and VE Day etc are important and should be memorialized by Americans; we lost many many soldiers on that day who gave their lives to the cause of freedom.

However, just because the US celebrates or memorializes a day does not make it an international holiday.

Yes, that’s right. The world does not revolve around the US. Sorry neocons, that’s just the way it is. Hollering and acting like screechy monkeys isn’t going to change this fact, and just makes the US look bad.

I’m reminded of what may be an apocryphal story about a professor who had a giant world map in his dining room, and whose foreign guests would point out that on their maps, their country was in the center of the map, not the US.