The living memory of World War II is passing away. In April, the oldest known survivor of Pearl Harbor died at 106 years old. A few weeks ago, a 102-year old veteran who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944) entered his eternal reward.
Sadly, less than one percent of the war’s veterans are still alive. However, more troubling and dark, the increasing deaths of witnesses — those who endured the conflict and its horrors — has been coupled with the rise of revisionist ahistorical conspiracies about the Second World War. Worse, this is increasingly a right-wing phenomenon.
Nearly a year apart from each other, Tucker Carlson interviewed guests Darryl Cooper and David Collum — “amateur” historians — who have erroneously circulated false narratives about the war, contradicting the story that the Allied Powers were entirely morally ‘good.’
Last summer, Cooper ignited a bevy of notoriety and backlash by claiming Winston Churchil was the “chief villain” of World War II for declaring war on Germany after the invasion of Poland. He even provided cover for Adolf Hitler. This August, Collum posited, “The story we got about World War II is all wrong” to which Carlson agreed, and even suggested the Allies should have aligned with the Nazis and fought the Soviet Union.
The interviews were certainly “incendiary” as World War II historian Victor Davis Hanson stated before refuting Collum’s mischaracterizations of the war point-by-point. The year prior, British historian Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, pummeled Cooper’s “staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact” against the man who, arguably, saved Western Civilization.
Still, millions of people consumed Carlson’s videos; and there is a susceptible audience prone to accept the historical inaccuracies as gospel on a first glance rather than critically reading to discern fact from fiction. In fact, Americans are reading less, so YouTube videos, social media, and podcasts hold more weight as sources of information. But the correction is never as large or widely promoted as the initial report; so there is a danger in the amplification of these egregious narratives.
Granted, World War II revisionism is not entirely new with the likes of Pat Buchanan arguing “there was nothing inevitable about Hitler’s war in the west” and that the Holocaust may have even been preventable. He even went so far as to call the war “unnecessary.”
That was nearly 20 years ago. He faced criticism then — even from Donald Trump. Certainly, all revisionism is not created equal if based on historical fact. Indeed, it is not completely unwarranted to reassess the war in light of new information or world events directly linked to the conflict. Yet this recent reevaluation of World War II is akin to the Left’s promulgation of the ahistorical 1619 Project — which has asserted America’s founding was entirely based on slavery, not the pursuit of freedom. In short, both ambitions are rooted in false narratives for political or cultural purposes.
No war is morally clear-cut — yet in recent history, World War II comes the closest to a justifiable conflict. Hitler was a bad actor. Prior to September 1939, his domestic and foreign actions toward German citizens and territories throughout Europe — such as the Rhineland, Austria, and the Sudetenland — further instigated the oncoming calamity. Meanwhile, Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, for all their faults, strove toward democratic ideals of freedom and liberty. This is best exemplified in Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s Order of the Day on D-Day — that the objectives were for “the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”
Freedom was the end game, as opposed to Nazism’s aspirations to establish a ‘Thousand Year Reich.’
This is not to say the war escapes a complicated, nuanced analysis. The U.S.-Britain alliance with Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union being chief among them. Indeed, Stalin killed millions more of his own citizens through purges than Hitler, a point of contention among some modern revisionists who suggest communism was the greater threat to peace than fascism, as evident by the ensuing Cold War.
To Churchill, Bolshevism and Nazism were both evil ideologies; but, in 1939, the latter was the immediate danger, rearing its “expansionist ambition” ahead of the Soviet Union. After Hitler’s defeat, he then rightly turned his attention — and criticism — toward the atrocities behind the Iron Curtain, a term he popularized and etched into the modern lexicon.
The bombings of Dresden and the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are also moral quandaries still debated more than 80 years later. Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” However, others estimated 250,000 to 1 million casualties if the Allied Powers invaded mainland Japan — but that is now relegated to a ‘what if’ of history.
Ultimately, the Allies were not perfect — and treating them like so is also misguided. History should remain history, based on empirical evidence, and myths as myths. But can one say the world would have been better if the Axis Powers were left to their own geopolitical and racial ambitions? The answer should be no. World War II, in short, was a good war, and the Allies were on the right side of history.
The new revisionists, however, champion the dismantling of the World War II ‘myth’ — yet instead of injecting nuance into the conversation, their claims reek of a right-wing nihilism: that the current globalized, liberal world order, born from the Second World War, has produced a cavalcade of domestic and foreign policy woes, as well as the erosion of sovereignty, and therefore must be overturned. Indeed, nations must have sovereignty — and the United Nations has been ineffective at thwarting wars and even has had evidence of corruption. Criticisms can be levied toward over-globalization and liberal institutions; but to suggest the war’s objectives were misguided because of its aftermath is a disservice to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.
Moreover, perceived American interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — which have been quagmires — have fueled the modern, renewed call for U.S. isolationism. To be fair, there should be a rigorous debate about what is classified as an American interest — and Americans should remain paramount in the decision-making; nevertheless, true isolationism is a fool’s errand. The U.S. economic roots in nearly every market alone make it impossible. And when the U.S. retreats, adversaries are more privy to fill the void and ignite wars, which happened during the Biden Administration.
To an extent, in the decades since, world leaders and prognosticators alike have often viewed historical crises through the World War II prism, most recently toward Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. If the West capitulates to him, would it not resemble the appeasement of Hitler — who reneged on the ‘peace in our time’ deal? But every crisis has resulted from a myriad of circumstances, personnel, and philosophies; and there are other historical events to draw lessons from, not merely the Second World War.
Or revisionists are reacting to the Left’s trivialization of the terms Nazi and fascist, which have been incorrectly overutilized, thus diluting the magnitude of those sadistic ideologies. Those words become meaningless — and labeling people as such, especially conservative-leaning politicians like George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, has led to extreme polarization in America.
More cynically, as Hanson suggests, there is an anti-Semitic underbelly propping some revisionist thought, which includes Holocaust denial.
World War II is, arguably, the most cataclysmic conflict in human history. It reshaped the world geopolitically, economically, and culturally. Yet despite its omnipresence, there is a lack of basic knowledge about the war. Indeed, 48% of Americans could not name a single Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War; and more than half of those aged 18 to 34 could “recognise D-Day as the day that Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy,” according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
This ignorance makes revisionism more dangerous, as audiences are less equipped to separate fact from fiction. The question becomes: what is the revisionists’ end game? Certainly not to perpetuate freedom or to properly educate the public. Regardless, it is sowing distrust in the very foundations of democracy.
The world is freer because of the Greatest Generation’s “great and noble undertaking.” The Allies were a force for good. Hitler needed to be defeated. And the Holocaust was real and evil. Ahistorical narratives fuel animosity — and to broadcast blatant falsehoods while the war’s veterans fade into the annals of history, those who could debunk revisionists’ claims more adamantly, is a great insult to their legacy.
It is now our responsibility to preserve their memory — and the hard lessons of their sacrifice — so that a war like World War II never happens again.
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