The history
of World War 2 will one day be told very differently. We all know the victors
write the history, and they particularly write the history to make their side
seem both more righteous and more justified in the whole affair, than the enemy.
But one day people will be able to evaluate the events of World War 2 from
afar, with non-biased goggles and little emotional attachment to the events,
and when that day comes, and the many war crimes of all sides are properly evaluated,
the
history will be recounted very differently,
“French and German authorities are preparing to dig in search
of a mass grave in a forest in Corrèze after a 98-year-old former French
resistance fighter who had kept silent for decades described the summary
execution of German soldiers there in 1944.
Edmond Réveil spoke to local media this week about how, as an
18-year-old officer for the resistance on 12 June 1944, he had witnessed the
mass execution of 47 German soldiers and one French woman accused of
collaborating with the Gestapo.
Réveil first spoke about the killings at a veterans’ meeting
in 2019, but he did not go to the media. As authorities now prepare to search a
wooded area near the village of Meymac and dig in coming months, he told
his story to the local paper La Montagne and other local media.
Réveil, who was codenamed “Butterfly” when he became a
teenage resistance liaison officer, told France Bleu radio on Thursday that
he had waited so long to speak out because he had been under pressure to stay
quiet at the time. “It had to stay secret – it was wrong to shoot prisoners.”
Smedley
Butler was correct when he said that War is a Racket. But so too is much
of the retelling of the war in many circles for some time afterwards. The events
of World War 2 created the world order that we live in today. And as long as
that world order remains in power, then the dominant telling of the war will be
the one determined by the elites of that world order. Such is true throughout
history for all wars really, some more than others, but for all wars. Didn’t Caesar
dress up his desire for personal glory in dominating the Gauls as a necessary
step in protecting Rome from the German tribes across the other side of the Rhine?
As the comedian
Jimmy Dore says, and I will likely butcher the quote and his joke, “America, a
capitalist nation, borrowed money from China a communist nation, to bring
democracy via conquest to Iraq a Muslim nation, that did not want it in the
first place. What people tell themselves about war, and what nations tell
themselves about war, and what historians are allowed to and not to say about what
actually happened are often very different to the reality on the ground.
How many more events happened like the one that this former French soldier is confessing to, after all this time? Many. War brutalizes the men involved. At the start of the war, it is said the Americans were horrified with the British policy of carpet bombing German cities, and by the end of the war they had gone far beyond what the British could accomplish. Committing atrocities that are unfathomable in scope. It will be interesting to hear what future generations think about these wars, that people living in modern West, are not supposed to think today.
Sometimes history has to be revised, because we were never properly taught it.
Angelique Chrisafis, 2023, https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/french-resistance-fighter-98-reveals-mass-execution-of-german-prisoners/ar-AA1bmUns?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=d4346720d899460c903babac1bb6ee59&ei=23
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