Fighting Historical Revisionism

Victor Davis Hanson has posted an article on revisionist history:

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.

Indeed, most recent op-eds commemorating V-E day either blamed the United States for Hamburg or for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, or for our supposed failure to credit the Russians for their sacrifices.

It's true that most people under the age of 30 know little about World War 2: it's ancient history to them, and they've been told repeatedly that it's of no relevance to them or their world. All the stories written and broadcast in the years following the war have long since passed from "current events" to "dusty tomes" and "scratchy filmstock". To a degree, much of what was produced in the 20 years following the war was conformist, US-centric, and triumphalist.

There were good reasons for that: the Americas were almost untouched by the physical destruction of war, and the US and Canadian economies in particular were vastly expanded by wartime production needs. The American film industry was already the largest in the world before the war, and did not shrink in size or importance during it. New York was the biggest centre of publishing for the book industry (London was both war-battered and suffering from the post-war austerity . . . books were a relative luxury good for years after the war ended).

The triumphalist tone? They'd won. They'd utterly destroyed the evils of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, at no small cost to themselves. It would have been a miracle if they hadn't been triumphal . . . and the world owes the Americans a debt it will never acknowledge both for their participation in the war and for them not becoming the new Empire after the war.

Revisionism holds a strange attraction for the winners of World War II. American textbooks discuss World War II as if a Patton, Le May, or Nimitz did not exist, as if the war was essentially the Japanese internment and Hiroshima. That blinkered and politically correct focus explains why so many Americans under 30 are simply ignorant about the nature and course of World War II itself. Similarly, the British have monthly debates on the immorality of their bombing Hamburg and Dresden.

In dire contrast, even the post-Soviet Russian government will not speak of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, the absorption of the Baltic states, the murder of millions of German citizens in April through June 1945 in Eastern Europe, and the mass execution of Polish officers. If we were to listen to the Chinese, World War II was about the gallant work of Mao's partisans, who in fact used the war to gain power, and then went on to kill 50 million of their own citizens — about the same number lost in all of World War II. Japan likewise has never come to terms with the millions of Asian civilians its armies butchered or its systematic brutality waged against American POWs.

The truth is that the supposedly biased West discusses the contribution of others far more than our former enemies — or Russian and Chinese allies — credit the British or Americans.

As a Canadian, I'm often struck by the lack of acknowledgement in both British and American works, of the contribution of Canada to the war effort. For a relatively tiny population, Canada put huge numbers of men and women into uniform, expanded from a mere six ships to the third-largest navy in the world by war's end, and more than held their own in the Normandy invasion (the Canadians were the furthest inland at the end of the first day's fighting). That being said, however, I do recognize that the war would still have been won if Canada had stayed on the sidelines or even passively aided the enemy. Our contribution, while worthy and appreciated at the time, was not decisive.

Australians and New Zealanders probably feel the same way — having pitched in to win the war, they're also footnotes in the military histories of the US and Britain.

But at least we're mentioned. Russian histories have been notorious for treating the western allied contribution to the war as negligible . . . or worse. Japanese histories might have been written about a war on a different planet.

There is a pattern here. Western elites — the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism — are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all. So leisured American academics tell us that Iwo Jima was unnecessary, if not a racist campaign, that Hiroshima had little military value but instead was a strategic ploy to impress Stalin, and that the GI was racist, undisciplined, and reliant only on money and material largess.

There are two disturbing things about the current revisionism that transcend the human need to question orthodoxy. The first is the sheer hypocrisy of it all. Whatever mistakes and lapses committed by the Allies, they pale in comparison to the savagery of the Axis or the Communists. Post-facto critics never tell us what they would have done instead — lay off the German cities and send more ground troops into a pristine Third Reich; don't bomb, but invade, an untouched Japan in 1946; keep out of WWII entirely; or in its aftermath invade the Soviet Union?

That is the advantage revisionists will always have: history didn't play out the way they'd prefer, so they can hypothesize and retroactively apply judgements as they please. Attribute modern motives (and especially dark and twisted motives) to historical leaders to make points whose validity you never need to prove. The attraction must be overwhelming to certain kinds of writers.