In an ideal world, we could take World War II at face value and celebrate the triumph of good over evil, but that’s not what we’ve done. Instead, Western leaders and media outlets used, and continue to use the war as a propaganda vehicle against their “adversaries.” They invented a whole fantasy narrative that communists were the primary baddies of the 20th Century, not the Nazis. That narrative, as ridiculous as it was during the Cold War, makes even less sense now. As a coherent global force, communism is gone. So why is everyone still peddling the lies? After months of pondering this question, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Red Scare was always a secondary narrative. The West’s primary motivation is Russophobia and Sinophobia. Our elites hated Russia and China before communism, and continue to hate them after communism.
The more I put aside the propaganda and look at World War II for what it really was, the more I am amazed. We endlessly blame the Soviet Union for everything that went wrong, but we give the Western allies a pass for basically handing Hitler all of Europe with almost no fight. The war might have gone very differently if the Germans had to conquer the West one house at a time in a grinding war of attrition, rather than marching triumphantly into undefended cities.
After the triumph of the Third Reich, there was very little Western resistance either. Throughout the whole war, France only produced 75,000 anti-fascist partisans. Even if we accept the most inflated claims of 400,000, that’s still 1% of France’s population of 40 million people. Compare this to Yugoslavia’s National Liberation Army of 650,000, out of 15 million people. Equally significant, the Nazis punished the Yugoslavs with brutal reprisals, killing well over one million partisans and civilians alike by the war’s end. It goes without saying that there was no need for such large-scale reprisals in France, as there was no effective resistance for them to reprise against. When questioned about the effectiveness of the French Resistance, German Reichminister Albert Speer responded “What resistance?”
As for the USA and United Kingdom, take a look at the timeline. The UK and France finally declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland in September 1940. This was a thoughtful gesture, but writing a nasty letter to Hitler didn’t accomplish anything. In the end, Hitler himself declared war on the USA, not the other way around. He also attacked first. U-boats devastated American shipping off the East coast for months before the US Navy mounted an effective defense against them.
Hitler’s decision to turn the USA into an outright enemy might seem odd at first glance but makes sense in the proper context of the moment. Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, after the German defeat in the Defense of Moscow. Operation Barbarossa was a failure in almost every metric; the Axis coalition failed to take Moscow and failed to cripple the Soviet Union’s industry. Not only that, they grossly underestimated the size and capabilities of the Red Army. By siding with Japan, Hitler could hope that their superior navy would tie up or even defeat the American war machine in the Pacific War. Meanwhile, Hitler’s U-boat fleet could strangle British supply lines. Of course he overestimated Japanese military and industrial strength and underestimated American strength, but his decision was still a rational one.
Strategic considerations aside, my main point here is that it is good that the Western allies eventually brought the war to Hitler, but this wasn’t some huge triumph of morality. It was the bare minimum, and even that appraisal is an exceptionally generous one.
Our collective moral perceptions of the war are nothing short of bizarre. Why do we fetishize so-called Blitzkrieg? The Germans grossly mismanaged the war right from the start, a failure that’s self-evident from the fact that they, well, lost. There’s a clear line between studying enemy tactics and heaping praise on them, especially when it’s completely undeserved. I can’t help but wonder if this is a polite way of admiring the Nazis without openly admitting it. Why do our leaders snub Victory Day observances, and why do allegedly left-leaning media outlets like the Guardian love to make fun of Russians for celebrating it? Are European and American oligarchs too childish to put aside their petty political grievances for a few hours? I would like to think Angela Merkel of all people of all people would have the good sense not to be disrespectful toward discussions of World War II, but apparently not.
Now the dear reader might think “what about the Soviet atrocities?” Yes, about those. I’m not suggesting that the Soviets were blameless in the war, but I do see a pattern of the West whitewashing their own atrocities and projecting them on “the commies.” To cite just one example, rape did happen on the Eastern front, and it was a capital offense. But let’s remember that Allied troops committed mass rapes in France, Germany, and Japan. The Western media hushed it up and I have been unable to find an example of even one soldier being punished for it. I can’t prove a negative, but I will point out the problem with punishing someone for a crime is that it requires admitting the crime happened.
To cite another example, I frequently see the claim that the Soviets abused German prisoners. An interesting assertion, but the large majority of German POWs came home alive, the same cannot be said about Soviet POWs. Many of the German POWs who did die in captivity were due to the Battle of Stalingrad, when the 6th Army was starving, making their deaths a short time later mostly self-inflicted. Should the Soviets shared their food more generously? Maybe, but remember that German POWs starved on the Western front too; almost a million died. I actually think criticizing Eisenhower for his decision to starve the POWs is unfair. Germany was in ruins and there was no food. What was he supposed to do? That said, it is grotesquely immoral to level accusations against the Soviet war effort when the equal or arguably worse crimes happened in the West as well.
There are quite a few other problems with the war too. Though the West appeased Hitler in the beginning, the Nazis’ monstrous behavior did provoke extreme anger toward them. As justified as it was to be angry with the Nazis for bombing civilians in London and the Japanese for massacring people in the Pacific, does that really justify exterminating entire populations of people with incendiary bombs and nuclear weapons? Why did delighted French mobs humiliate women and shave their heads? What was their crime, exactly? Falling in love with German soldiers? I guess when it came time to bully girls, people suddenly found their courage.
Furthermore, the West’s actions following the war are simply disgusting, and there is no other word for it. Churchill in particular decided to save as many Nazis he could from Eastern Europe. Stalin found out and bullied him into giving many of them back. Are we really expected to believe that West suddenly decided that the Nazis were their friends, and hadn’t considered them friends all along? Maybe the Nazis were simply pet attack dogs against the Untermensch, but made the mistake of biting the hand that fed them.
Not only is this propaganda and whitewashing disrespectful to the Soviets, it’s disrespectful to our own heroes from the war. Last June, everybody at the White House apparently forgot about D-Day, and the presidential Twitter account didn’t so much as mention it. That indifference makes sense, sadly. If the Nazis were beloved pets who lost their way and had to be put down, then it’s only natural that we wouldn’t celebrate their defeat.
Ian Kummer
Support my work by making a contribution through Boosty
All text in Reading Junkie posts are free to share or republish without permission, and I highly encourage my fellow bloggers to do so. Please be courteous and link back to the original.
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
Thank you for speaking the truth. This is very valuable for us!
I like how you ignore Lend-Lease and the Europe first strategy. You also misunderstand, like basically everyone does to be fair, the point of ‘appeasement’. It wasn’t to give Hitler what he wanted in the hope that he would stop. It was to buy time to prepare more for a war everyone understood was inevitable (including Germany itself, which seems mostly to have stumbled into war with France and the UK. It didn’t expect them to stand by Poland, and was planning for a much later confrontation, as evidenced by for instance the Plan Z expansion of the navy stretching all the way to 1948). The oft-vilified Chamberlain is a big part of the reason Churchill had an RAF strong enough to win the Battle of Britain.
And congratulations; you’ve discovered that nation states aren’t motivated by moral concerns. They were willing to utilize Nazis as tools in the post-war confrontation with what they viewed as a geostrategic threat.
Also no, the Nazis have been firmly entrenched as the premier baddy in the public consciousness in the West. From Indiana Jones to Wolfenstein to Inglorious Basterds, Nazis are an ever present and reliable arch-villain.
Ben,
What about Lend-Lease? Yes, it was nice that the American banking class was willing to sell weapons at an inflated price. So what? Literally who cares and why is that an accomplishment, let alone something to be proud of? As for Europe first, largely from pressure from the USSR, and that’s the chief reason a second front was even opened at all. As for your argument about “buying time,” there isn’t any need to buy time when the western allies clearly had a large edge on Germany, and could have ended Hitler’s regime at any time they chose.
Because if your entire argument is that the West supported the Nazis until they went off the reservation, and that the US only fought them when it had no other choice, that runs up against the fact that the US government, against the isolationist impulses of the majority of its population, started giving out aid before the Japanese and Hitler gave it a justification to become an official combatant.
No to mention the Bush crime families involvement of Hitlers rise to power by bank rolling Nazisim. George W. Bush’s Grandpa, Senator Prescott Bush. So “W” came from a long line of traitors.