Was It “The Good War”?
"Yes, it was a good war," writes Richard Cohen in his column challenging the thesis of pacifist Nicholson Baker in his new book, Human Smoke, that World War II produced more evil than good.
Baker's compelling work, which uses press clips and quotes of Axis and Allied leaders as they plunged into the great cataclysm, is a virtual diary of the days leading up to World War II.
Riveting to this writer was that Baker uses some of the same episodes, sources and quotes as this author in my own book out in May, Churchill, Hitler and "The Unnecessary War".
On some points, Cohen is on sold ground. There are things worth fighting for: God and country, family and freedom. Martyrs have ever inspired men. And to some evils pacifism is no answer. Resistance, even unto death, may be required of a man.
But when one declares a war that produced Hiroshima and the Holocaust a "Good War," it raises a question: good for whom?
Britain declared war on Sept. 3, 1939, to preserve Poland. For six years, Poland was occupied by Nazi and Soviet armies and SS and NKVD killers. At war's end, the Polish dead were estimated at 6 million. A third of Poland had been torn away by Stalin, and Nazis had used the country for the infamous camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz.
Fifteen thousand Polish officers had been massacred at places like Katyn. The Home Army that rose in Warsaw at the urging of the Red Army in 1944 had been annihilated, as the Red Army watched from the other side of the Vistula. When the British celebrated V-E day in May 1945, Poland began 44 years of tyranny under the satraps of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
Was World War II "a good war" for the Poles?
Was it a good war for Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, overrun by Stalin's army in June 1940, whose people saw their leaders murdered or deported to the Gulag never to return? Was it a good war for the Finns who lost Karelia and thousands of brave men dead in the Winter War?
Was it a good war for Hungarians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Rumanians and Albanians who ended up behind the Iron Curtain? In Hungary, it was hard to find a women or girl over 10 who had not been raped by the "liberators" of the Red Army. Was it a good war for the 13 million German civilians ethnically cleansed from Central Europe and the 2 million who died in the exodus?
Was it a good war for the French, who surrendered after six weeks of fighting in 1940 and had to be liberated by the Americans and British after four years of Vichy collaboration?
And how good a war was it for the British?
They went to war for Poland, but Winston Churchill abandoned Poland to Stalin. Defeated in Norway, France, Greece, Crete and the western desert, they endured until America came in and joined in the liberation of Western Europe.
Yet, at war's end in 1945, Britain was bled and bankrupt, and the great cause of Churchill's life, preserving his beloved empire, was lost. Because of the "Good War" Britain would never be great again.
And were the means used by the Allies, the terror bombing of Japanese and German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of women and children, perhaps millions, the marks of a "good war"?
Cohen contends that the evil of the Holocaust makes it a "good war." But the destruction of the Jews of Europe was a consequence of this war, not a cause. As for the Japanese atrocities like the Rape of Nanking, they were indeed horrific.
But America's smashing of Japan led not to freedom for China, but four years of civil war followed by 30 years of Maoist madness in which 30 million Chinese perished.
For America, the war was Pearl Harbor and Midway, Anzio and Iwo Jima, Normandy and Bastogne, days of glory leading to triumph and the American Century.
But for Joseph Stalin, it was also a good war. From his pact with Adolf Hitler he annexed parts of Finland and Rumania, and three Baltic republics. His armies stood in Berlin, Prague and Vienna; his agents were vying for power in Rome and Paris; his ally was installed in North Korea; his protege, Mao, was about to bring China into his empire. But it was not so good a war for the inmates of Kolyma or the Russian POWs returned to Stalin in Truman's Operation Keelhaul.
Is a war that replaces Hitler's domination of Europe with Stalin's and Japan's rule in China with Mao's a "good war"? We had to stop the killers, says Cohen. But who were the greater killers: Hitler or Stalin, Tojo or Mao Zedong?
Can a war in which 50 million perished and the Christian continent was destroyed, half of it enslaved, a war that has advanced the death of Western civilization, be truly celebrated as a "good war"?
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The censorship in the West is way over the top.
I always thought Fred Reed was off base when he said the U.S. was in the grip of feminism. He was far too right for comfort.
@NGPM - Another sidebar .... rock-and-a-hard-place:
"But I have in the past made the mistake of attempting to impress postmodernists, and whether I won their respect or not (in most cases I am sure I did not) I came away hating myself for ever wanting it in the first place."
I get the impression that as more and more people become more and more steeped in modernist ideology -- Left or Right -- it becomes more and more difficult to communicate any sane or intelligent observation to them, however basic or small.
Be blunt .... and they get offended, oversimplify your words into strawman-form.... and hence they tune out what you're really trying to convey.
("You're a racist," or "You're an anti-war pacifist," etc....)
Be diplomatic .... and they assume you are just reiterating what they already think anyhow ..... and hence they tune out you're really trying to convey.
("Oh, sure we need to worry about Muslims taking over the West ... which is why I'm glad I voted for Bush!" or "Oh, sure, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake... which is why I pine for the good ol' days of Clinton...")
Trying to share even the most meager crumb of truth becomes a tightrope-walk.
@52: Well, since the discussion is about over, I suppose the diversion can't hurt. To cite only the most notorious figure of the Catholic right wing in the entire world, I think it was Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre himself who said something to the effect of the mentality of people who don't believe in absolute truth is so alien that it is a futility to attempt to reason with them.
At one time I thought Dr. Fleming was something of a grouch. But as I've grown older I've lost my temper a couple of times with people of stupid persuasions (I hesitate to call them "stupid" myself because breaking out myself was quite a nightmare. Other times I've tossed a statement based on an assumption that (almost) everyone posting on this site would know is sensible, and the horror I provoked from passers-by was frustratingly dramatic.
Of course, what's more frustrating--and what leads to those inappropriate outbursts--is that feeling of stalemate, like you reach a point where you can no longer confide in or vent to anyone because no one around you speaks your language. But we shouldn't complain: personally, I wouldn't start speaking NARAL or RNC for the world.
"NGPM: You are doubtlessly right about the evil of deconstruction. Even so , there is the issue of whether the myth is in itself harmful to the nation, and I would argue that the WWII myth is very harmful, as is the Lincoln myth, for the reasons I’ve already mentioned. The myths must be deconstructed in order to help redeem what’s left of the national character, which has been warped by the myths. This warping, in turn, fuels much of our arrogant, destructive crusading all over the world." -Allen Wilson
I understand NGPM's concern. Deconstruction or destructuring is important and inevitable in order to ascertain if the component parts of a relative whole contain the essence of themselves essential to truth...When it is felt or suspected the relative whole in question is hollow or bogus i.e. in this case the good war/bad war, etc.
Go back to the Greeks for guidance because afterward the Latin notion that myth destroys logos or word in the process and so it was either myth/ or logos [not both] became the standard in philosophy yet with us today - more, than less. {Another mistake held as a standard is to avoid contradiction in order to arrive at truth but that is false as well. Truth is a double-edged sword, but that is for another discussion.}
The Greeks understood that myth is also process, just as logos is not only word but process and so myth is also logos intertwined along the way in TIME. ... Until the point at which the most pristine essence of each can't remain a tandem and they separate. Thus the appropriate combination in time and separation at the appropriate time are necessary, (it's the human/divine factor walking hand in hand), and when appropriate not evil. Then to force connection after the Fact in time, would lapse into that being an evil.
Thus both gentlemen from their own perspective in time are accurate.
Another mistake is that myth is destroyed by 'logic' also associated with logos (and is one of the few mistakes in Plato's work). But the Greeks found out and proved of course that logic is not absolute. ... I called Plato's few mistakes in that regad, when I posted as 'george' on the old sf site - the Platonic facade. And also referred to such similar mistakes when they cropped in conceptual perspective in modernity as the Semitic Facade. Plato was the greatest philosopher ever or neck & neck with Aristotle but it's an imperfect world and he was not an exception in that regard.
Thus nothing religious (matters of faith) can ever be destroyed per se, and least of all by 'logic.' The only thing that can destroy the religious is the withdrawl of the God or the divine and that equates with such a tandem no longer being timely in terms of the preservation of the most essential of each.
So I agree with both gentleman except with the caveat that to indicate as NGPM did that all deconstruction or destructuring is flat out evil (as some'times' it may be) 'as if' that were an absolute without the consideration of time is a mistake. ... And one of the old mistakes too of Christianity under an imbalance toward the Latin at the expense of the Greek in toto. In the past [in time] such Latin proclivity (or imbalance) may not have been a mistake but something temporally fortuitous. And going forward needs an eye both toward the present as it unfolds and thus toward eternity as well. Yes.
It's why the exoteric and the esoteric in religion (and the best ones have both) although different only at the level of their most pristine essence are along the way in time also Legitimately the same. Good.
We are all in time a sign that cannot be completely read only approximated. Until the garments of this world case by case are completely enfolded into eternity (we build for eternity by dwelling - therein along the way as Chronicles has pointed out in one of its issues). And is why we have no purpose per se but rather exist within an occasion always for indebtedness and responsibility which is the first not the last standard of our Christianity. 'The first shall be last, the last first.'
'What should I do, seeing thee so indeed,
That tremble at the'imagination?' -W.S.
And that's the way it is, April 11, 2008 - the place to be
P.S. that's why I like to say Myth Works
You are, of correct, that I am merely surmising as to Buchanan from the various writings of his that I have read. Of course, I am also not playing out my ethnic biases and foreign rivalries in this thread either, as I'm an American.
Pole
FYI, Pilsudski rejected an alliance with the Russian Whites, whose Constituent Assembly had recognized Polish independence.
Red commander Tukhachevsky is on record for believing that a Polish-White alliance could've very well resulted in a defeat of Bolshevism.
In 1938, Poland joined Nazi Germany and Hungary in ther dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Something which the West didn't oppose. The USSR offered a united front with the West to opppse a nazi advance on Czechoslovakia. The West opted for the appeasement route; no doubt hoping that the Nazis and Soviets would beat each other to a pulp, with the Westy left alone. Albeit a monster, Stalin was diplomatically prudent in making his own deal with the Nazis.
It's a great shame that many innocents die over such geopolitical board games.
Michael Averko,
I have no problem with Polish foreign policy (or any other country's foreign policy) being subject to debate or criticism such as yours, as no country is perfect.
My objection is to a lopsided attitude of Buchanan, who still hasn't gotten over Versailles, who constantly criticizes Britain, but never ever criticizes Germany.
I think that one reason Buchanan seems so one-sided is because of the need to clear things up after decades of often rabid anti-German historicism. Pointing out the faults of other countries in order to balance things is not pro-Germanism or pro-Nazism. In order to obtain a clear view of the disasters of the twentieth century, we cannot continue with an 'Allies good, Germans bad' view of things.
Mr. Buchanan:
A wonderful encapsulation of the war's "unintended" (and sometimes not so unintended) effects. Of course, for millions, it was not a "good war", at all. I am happy you are always ready to challenge the cherished beliefs which seem to override any rational analysis and appreciation of major world events. The Second World War was, as you noted, laced with harm being done to innocents by the "saviours", and while the defeat of Hitler and Tojo is laudable, the time to take responsibility for what we - and our allies - did is long overdue. We need to admit it and try to redress it! Where it was reasonable "collateral damage", say so . . . and where it wasn't, admit it and assume responsibility. This isn't "trashing a memory", but standing against the "flight from responsibility" that characterizes so much of our modern thinking at all levels.
No. 6: When distinguishing between the Hitlerian view of Poles, and the Stalinist view, remember not only that the Russians re-opened the universities, but the fact that first, when the Poles greeted the Russian invaders in September 1939, coming in from the East three weeks after the Germans came in from the West, they thought the Russians were helpers against the Germans; they weren't, but rather were in Poland to take the Eastern half of that 1939 country which had been negotiated for by them in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. And, they kept it; so, when the 1945 defeat of the Germans was complete, if you were a pre-war citizen of Lvov, Poland, for example, you were now a Russian, because Stalin made sure - in agreements with the Allies - that the half of Poland he got from Hitler would remain his. And: who egged on the Polish Home Army to rise up in Warsaw, and then sat by and watched it be destroyed? The same friendly Russians who killed the Polish officer corps at Katyn. So, they opened the universities? To teach what?
No. 20: Japan ". . . was on a maniacal rampage . . ." Please. Yes, Japan was on a program of conquest to establish its pre-eminence in East Asia; our provocation was mainly to curtail oil shipments, to allow a "private" air force to be raised among Americans to fight for Chiang Kai-Shek, and so on. "I don't think Hitler needed much provocation . . .": no, he didn't. Hitler simply applied bluster and bullying tactics in international politics - sometimes they are (and were) successful, and sometimes not. But that doesn't change the fact that he got a lot of provocation from us. The "Neutrality Act" was a sham, and the order for the U.S. Navy to "shadow German ships" and report their positions to the British, the "shoot on sight" order against German U-Boats prior to the beginning of the war (for us), Lend-Lease, etc., provided all the provocation anyone could ask for, even if the Germans had no idea of the existence of the Argentia Bay, (Newfoundland) Conference.
I hold no brief for the Japanese and Germans who committed atrocities against helpless people. Such acts themselves assured that any "gains" could only be repulsive to most of us and thus vainglorious achievements for the perpetrators. Likewise, any such acts by the Allies should be "owned up to", and accepted for what they are, and to the degree possible, atoned for.
Finally, Mr. Buchanan, I am sure you are not perturbed by those who try to insinuate that you are somehow "Nazi"-influenced: this is the intellectual refuge of people who need a smear-crutch to bolster their arguments, because the facts do not support them.
@59
During the Cold War, there were people in the West (mostly in academia) who lectured Poles (and others living with Soviet jackboot in their face) about what was good for them.
Fortunately, they were not taken seriously.
Neither should you.