When you
speak to the average person about World War 2, they will generally think in
these terms: this was a war that Churchill was desperate to win against the
AXIS powers, he and Britain stood alone against the rising tides of evil, France
was too weak to properly contribute, and America saved Europe’s butt from the
Nazis. That's the simplistic view that many westerners have.
This perspective is so common in the West that it pervades our popular culture, as this example from the Simpsons shows:
But this view
of World War 2 is a very incomplete picture. Many westerns will know that
America and Britian allied with the Soviets to beat the Axis of Italy, Germany
and Japan and their satellites, but very few realize just how much Eurasia,
including Russia, contributed to the war effort,
“Likewise,
the dominant Western narrative of WWII increasingly frames the conflict as a
stark moral battle between good and evil. As a result, there is a growing
reluctance to fully acknowledge the pivotal roles that Russia and China played
in the defeat of Nazi Germany and militarist Japan…
…Instead,
the predominant view in most Western countries credits the US as the primary
force behind victory, along with limited support from other allies. This
reading of WWII has nothing to do with reality, but it nicely fits the now
popular Manichean interpretation of world politics.
Another
typical distortion of history is the selective portrayal of the victims of the
war, often shaped by a distinctly Eurocentric perspective. Much attention is
given to the atrocities endured by Europeans under Nazi occupation or by
Europeans in Asia at the hands of the Japanese, while the immense suffering of
non-European populations frequently receives far less recognition.
Every
human life is of equal value, and all victims deserve empathy. Even those who
served in the German and Japanese armed forces during WWII should not be
indiscriminately labeled as criminals; the notion of “collective guilt” must
not override the principle of individual responsibility for verifiable war
crimes.
However,
it is often overlooked in contemporary Western discourse that the Soviet Union
and China suffered the heaviest human cost of WWII – with casualties reaching
27 million and 35 million, respectively. A significant portion of these losses
were civilians, and the scale and brutality of wartime atrocities committed on
Soviet and Chinese territories far exceeded those experienced in most other
regions.
Contemporary
politics inevitably shapes how we interpret the past, as people often seek
historical narratives that align with their present-day beliefs and agendas.
Yet history should be approached with integrity, not as a tool to justify
current political positions. This is not about defending national pride or
preserving comforting myths; every nation, regardless of size or wealth,
carries both moments of honor and episodes of regret in its historical journey.
A balanced national narrative includes both triumphs and failures.”[1]
This is very
important to meditate on because the Western view of WW2 is still basically shaped
by the propaganda that was pumped out by western leaders in the West during the
war, and which arguably never went away. The idea that the righteous West was
fighting against the evil Axis.
There is no doubt that the Axis powers committed atrocities. Some seek to deny this, but this is simply an overcorrection. The truth is that the war brutalized all who were involved, and as the war progressed both sides used increasingly inhumane tactics, which culminated in allied war crimes like the bombing of civilian Dresden and the Atomic attacks on Japan, among many others.
Part of the problem with the way we remember ourselves in this war is that not only are the war crimes of our side downplayed massively, they are often also used to justify ongoing war crimes today. It is not uncommon to see people saying that what we did in Dresden justifies what Israel is today doing in Gaza. How we remember WW2 really makes a difference with how our nations think about justice and just war. And the West’s skewed perspectives on this war have caused our leaders to justify all sorts of ill advised and inhuman wars across the world since 1945. The "we were righteous in our actions" narrative about the West has created a self-righteous approach to aggression against many other nations.
As Kurtonov says, “This is not about defending national pride or preserving comforting myths; every nation, regardless of size or wealth, carries both moments of honor and episodes of regret in its historical journey. A balanced national narrative includes both triumphs and failures.” Every nation should be willing to celebrate its moments of honour, but also mourn and repent for its moments of regret. But when history is remembered in a caricatured way where we are always the good guys and we were always fighting cartoon villains, then not only do we not learn from the past, we repeat our mistakes again and again and again, and feel justified in doing so.
The
destabilization of the Middle East is a good example of this. The West has sought
to tame the Middle East, alongside Israel, like it did Germany. But the problem
is that the Middle Eastern conflict zone is very different, and our world is now very
different. The West does not have the capacity to achieve this goal, nor do we have a moral right to subjugate the region. Yet you will hear people continually argue that we fought a just war
in WW2, so maybe this is justified today. But what if our side was not
as righteous as we like to think or are often trained to remember? This undermines a lot of the argument for what the West is doing in the Middle East today.
This is not
about beating ourselves up and buying into nonsense white guilt or anything like
that, either. This is more about simply recognizing that evil exits in all
nations, and evil bears certain bad fruit, we should look for that fruit to identify where evil is in action. Do not judge a nation by its rhetoric
but by its actions. Which ever side you are on, evil is still evil and to
respond to evil with evil simply lowers you to the level of those you are
seeking to resist.
As Christians
we have a duty to be honest about our past, so that we are better able to be
the conscience of society going into the future. I personally think allying with Communism to fight Nazism was a mistake, and the decline of the West in
the 20th century proves that. We won the war but lost our souls as nations. We should have let these two beasts
combat each other instead.
But there is
another lesson that we learn from examining WW2 more honestly. And that is that
Russia is a much harder nut to crack than people realize. In the minds of many
westerners it was the American army that won World War 2. But Russia mobilized
more men and lost more men on the eastern front beyond anything that was seen on
the western front where the US and Britain were fighting Germany. Perhaps too
many western elites have built their view of WW2 on Hollywood movies
and this is why they are foolishly escalating a war with a nation that neither they, nor
we, are equipped to beat.
Even Australia’s
Prime Minister has said he
is open to sending troops to Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force,
“The
Prime Minister today told media Australia "stands ready to assist"
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy if a call for help against Russian advances was
made. "Our position on Ukraine is very clear. We stand with the people of
Ukraine and we stand with President Zelenskyy," the PM said at a press
conference in Sydney.”[2]
I think it is entirely possible he does not really understand just how stupid a move this would be, and this is in part because of a flawed Eurocentric view of how WW2 was won. People forget just how much Russia was involved in this victory, and they also forget just how much the US and other allies were not interested in heeding Churchill’s calls to continue against Soviet Russia in 1945. Because they knew it was too much of a risk.
Sometimes bad history is not just a point of error, but a point of danger. The West has severely over-estimated its capabilities since WW2 ended. We were ground to a halt by Chinese troops in Korea. We lost the will to fight because of an intractable enemy in Vietnam. We have spent trillions seeking to tame a Middle East that cannot be tamed. We have lost many wars in the region as a result, with one notable exception in the 1990’s. And we have declined in relative strength to the rest of the world in the mean time.
Not
everything we know about World War 2 is wrong, but the overarching narrative of
the US victory, helping the plucky and stoic British is incomplete, and a
greater evaluation of our reliance on Eurasian allies to win that war, might
just humble us enough to realize the danger which the West is in today. Russia
is far more formidable than most westerners realized, and the US and Europe are
far less capable than most people believe. Propaganda is part of the reason why
so many people are surprised by this.
List of
References
Honestly Korea isn’t quite fair, the brief was not to liberate the whole peninsula but the parallel, which we did. No one was trying to actually start WW3.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside the same way we’re not the same people that won WW2, neither are the Russians. What’s interesting about the current war was how corrupt and unprepared both sides were.
The Russians found out in real time the delta between their paper strength and actual strength, turns out a century of atheism does not honest record keeping make.
The Ukrainians were also less prepared than I would have thought. Unlike the Anglosphere with our worldwide commitments, whether we should have those or not, Ukraine only has one natural enemy, and its entire military and intelligence apparatus should have been geared for it. I can’t escape the feeling they should have been better prepared, but like the Russians, honesty wasn’t something they were prepared to need.
Ironically we can find answers in Zelensky’s show! That show especially the first season shows a Ukraine that is titanically corrupt at every institution and every level (no comforting lies about corrupt leaders oppressing a noble people; at one point a road crew foreman bails for Cyprus with stolen funds). There’s a Nazi problem in the show, played from grim laughs. Behind it all is a shadowy group of oligarchs who mostly want international involvement because it makes it easier to steal IMF loans.