Mark Paul |
Jews Greet the Soviet Invaders The purpose of this compilation is not simply to present evidence for the widespread phenomenon of throngs of Jews, often dressed in their best attire for the occasion, avidly greeting the Soviet invaders of Poland in September 1939. Jewish accounts about such pro-Soviet outbursts are legion, as are Polish accounts. Many of them attest to the boundless and uncritical enthusiasm for the new regime that consumed large segments of the Jewish population. That, after all, is not the crux of the Polish case. What is disconcerting, is that these manifestations were generally accompanied by declarations of loyalty to the Soviet Union and open and flagrant displays of anti-Polish sentiments and conduct. In Wilno:
According to another Jewish eyewitness from Wilno:
Israeli historian, Dov Levin, writes:
In the largely Jewish small town of Wiszniew:
A frenzy broke out in Nowogrodek that could have had fatal consequences had the person fingered as an enemy of the new order in fact been a Pole:
The situation in Slonim was described by a Hebrew teacher as follows:
In Braslaw:
In Ostrowek, a village near Iwacewicze (Polesia),
In Bialystok:
Another Jewish account from Bialystok states:
In Horochow (Volhynia),
A Jew from Warsaw, who found himself in Luck, reported with a foresight that seems to have been rather rare in those times:
In Rowne, young Jews marched ... in the streets, holding high the red flag ... and singing the communist songs. A Polish soldier, who observed a pro-communist parade led by a group of Jews in honour of the Red Army, estimated that about ninety percent of 300 people, who took part were cheering Jews. In Ostrog, in a comedy of errors, a Franciscan priest dressed in a long cassock was mistaken for a Soviet commissar by Jews, who set out to greet the Red Army. They bowed low before him. Local Jews with red armbands were soon swarming the streets acting as the militia. In Lwow, pro-Soviet "enthusiasts", consisting mostly of Jews and some Ukrainians, greeted the Red Army as it marched into the city on September 22. Groups of young men met the Soviets on the outskirts of the city and ... welcomed them with red banners, revolutionary songs and music. Red flags, made by ripping the white portion off the red and white Polish banner, draped windows and balconies and adorned buildings and gateways. In front of the Grand Theatre, an impassioned address to a Soviet tank division leader was delivered by a rabbi, who reportedly expressed the Jewish community's gratitude for the long-awaited demise of the Polish state. Hugo Steinhaus, a renowned mathematician of Jewish origin, recalled with shame the servility of "an enormous mass" of Jews from Lwow, who
In Sniatyn,
In anticipation of the Soviet arrival, local Jews adorned a square in Boryslaw with huge portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Marx and Engels. They brought out a table which they covered with a red cloth and erected a triumphal arch which bore pro-Soviet slogans. In Drohobycz, the difference in attitude between the Polish and Jewish population was striking:
The prevailing mood was captured in a Jewish diary:
Some went even further. That same diarist encountered an old Jew in a shtetl, who observed:
There are many accounts which attest to the fact that elderly Jews could also fall into pro-Soviet bliss. A grey-haired Jew from Boremel (Volhynia), by the name of Lerner, who had the appearance of a patriarch, when asked by a Soviet soldier how old he was, replied: I am four-days old. How can you be four days old?, inquired the puzzled soldier.I was born when the Red Army arrived. A Jewish eyewitness recalls, how a Jewish doctor in the town of Bursztyn, in Eastern Galicia, raised his fist clenched in the communist-style to salute his Soviet comrades. The theme of Stalin being a Messiah for the Jews was widespread. A high school student from Lwow wrote:
These sycophantic displays enjoyed particular longevity in smaller border towns such as Wolozyn, where a Jewish witness recalled the pervasive pro-Soviet mood of the Jewish population as follows:
Polish accounts from Lwow are also informative:
The situation in a small village outside Rowne, in predominantly Ukrainian Volhynia, a region far removed from the German front and close to the Soviet border, was described by a Polish eyewitness with all its striking and symbolic juxtapositions:
The significance of what was happening was not lost on some Jews, mostly from the educated and culturally assimilated spheres, such as the following witness to events in Zbaraz, a town north of Tarnopol:
When this Jewish youth returned to his home town of Lwow, the same atmosphere prevailed there:
In the face of these abundant testimonies, both Jewish and Polish, it is amazing to read Jan T. Gross's recent assessment of what transpired. ... We have no clear evidence to judge the size of the welcoming groups, he writes dismissively. ... Undoubtedly, only a small fraction of the local population showed up on these occasions. As to why the youth predominated among them, Gross observes glibly:
The views of Israeli historian Robert S. Wistrich are even more strident. According to Wistrich, not only is the enthusiastic welcome by Jews of the invading Red Army a myth, but also it is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. The latter, rather ugly, charge is undoubtedly calculated to stifle debate on this topic.
Most Jews, who lived through those times, such as Michel (Mendel) Mielnicki, have a different recollection of conditions in their small towns, in his case Wasilkow, just outside Bialystok. Furthermore, they know who was present when the Soviets arrived, why they were there and what they were cheering for. The following is his recollection of that "love affair":
Michael Maik, a native of the town of Sokoly, penned this account in his wartime diary:
The authors of The Memorial Book of Dawidgrodek, a small town in Polesia, are even more explicit about their new loyalties and their condemnation of the vanquished Polish state:
Jan T. Gross claims, but provides no evidence, that ... in many instances ... the welcoming ceremonies were organized on explicit instructions, and people were forced to attend; elsewhere, he claims that the triumphal arches ... were erected most often out of fear. He assures us that ... the majority of the residents were fearful of the Red Army and ... only a fraction of the local population showed up on these occasions. The conspicuously large street crowds of Jews "milling" in cities such as Lwow, Wilno and Bialystok can be explained simply by the fact that the Jewish population had doubled in size because of the influx of refugees from the German occupation zone, which created a severe housing shortage. However, these fanciful claims do not find support in Jewish testimonies nor do they explain the overwhelming receptions, given to the Red Army by Jews in small towns, where refugees were rather scarce. A common occurrence was creating "ersatz" Soviet flags by cutting off the white upper portion of Polish flags, thereby giving more colour to the accompanying pro-Soviet chanting. Before it can be seriously suggested that all this was merely a display of gratitude for saving Jews from an unknown fate at the hands of the Germans, and that it did not in any way cast aspersions on the loyalty or even neutrality of the large masses of jubilant participants, one should consider how Jews in Western Poland viewed pro-Nazi outbursts on the part of the ethnic German population living there. A young German-speaking Jewish woman from the heavily German city of Bielsko, in Polish Silesia, recorded her sense of shock and indignation at her German neighbours' behaviour in the early days of September 1939:
According to German reports, enraged Jews also attacked German civilians who were taken hostage by the Polish army or Polish authorities during the early stages of the German invasion. On the march through Kutno, a group of ethnic Germans were set upon by
Even in the Eastern Borderlands, Jews looked with trepidation as the German minority began to show it true colours even before the arrival of either the Germans or Soviets. As one Jewish resident of Wlodzimierz Wolynski (Volhynia), describes:
Outbursts of pro-Soviet solidarity were not restricted to the Eastern Borderlands. The Germans and Soviets had originally agreed to a partition line running significantly to the west of the River Bug and, for a brief period, the Soviets occupied a large portion of Central Poland, namely Lublin Province (in addition to the Lomza region, from which they did not withdraw). There too, as in Siedlce, the Jewish population erected triumphal arches and greeted the Soviet invaders enthusiastically donning red armbands and ribbons. In some towns near the Soviet border, Poles and even Polish officials were initially among the throngs greeting the Soviet army. Indeed, Polish soldiers were given orders by their commanders not to fire at the Soviet army. Duped by Soviet propaganda, these Poles were under the mistaken impression that the Soviets had come to help them fight the Germans, and not to subjugate their country. The Soviet tanks that rolled into Kopyczynce, for example, were adorned with Polish flags and slogans of Soviet help in the fight against the common Nazi enemy. The Poles were soon disabused of these short-lived illusions, however. As the confusion gave way to the certainty that Soviets did not come as defenders of Poland, dejected, they abandoned the cheering throngs. Many Jews, Belorussians and Ukrainians, on the other hand, openly welcomed the prospect of Soviet rule instead of Polish rule. The reality of collaboration ran much deeper than warmly greeting the invading Soviet forces, however, and its consequences had a devastating impact on the Polish population and on Polish-Jewish relations. As we shall see, Jewish collaboration with the Soviet invaders was responsible, directly or indirectly, for the loss of many thousands of Polish lives. |
.
Library of Professor Richard A. Macksey in Baltimore
Monday, June 14, 2010
POLAND: Soviets & Jews
Dying Star-the American WASP
That Bright, Dying Star, the American WASP
Kagan Nomination Marks Another Faded Day in the Establishment's Illustrious but Insular History; a New Path to Power
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704414504575244622954114574.html
By ROBERT FRANK
On a recent morning at the Links Club, New York's wood-paneled preserve of the old banking elite, a small crowd of white-haired members gathered for breakfast.
The talk around the tables, over poached eggs and toast, was of Europe and sovereign-debt markets. Some were quietly negotiating deals. The crowd was mostly older, though it included a smattering of 40-something and 50-something members.
While undeniably upper-crust, the scene, which included a Latin American and an Asian, was a far cry from the Links Club of 20 years ago, when doing business was forbidden and the strictly homogenous crowd of Protestant blue-bloods spent their mornings comparing golf scores and vacation homes.
"It's changed with the times," said one former member. "That's both our gain and our loss."
In the long downward spiral of what used to be known as America's Protestant Establishment, there have been several momentous milestones: Harvard's opening up its admissions policies after World War II. Corporate America's rush in the 1980s to bring more diversity to the corner office. Barack Obama's inauguration as the first African-American president.
Of the 111 Supreme Court Justices who have served, 35 have been Episcopalians, making them the largest religious group on the court, according to court historians. The court's first non-Protestant was Catholic Justice Roger Taney, appointed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836.History may reveal another milestone—Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court. If she is confirmed, the nation's nine most powerful judges will all be Catholic or Jewish, leaving the court without a Protestant member for the first time.
"The fact that we're going to zero Protestants in the court may not be as significant as the fact that her appointment perfectly reflects the decline of the Establishment, or the WASP Establishment, in America," said David Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame.
Seen from the distance of time, the changes are stunning. In the 1960s, the vast majority of corporate managers were Protestant, according to E. Digby Baltzell's famous 1964 tome, "The Protestant Establishment."
The percentage of Protestants in Congress has dropped to 55% from 74% in 1961, according to Pew Forum. The corner offices of the top banks, once ruled by Rockefellers and Bakers, now include an Indian-American and the grandson of a Greek immigrant.
In old-money enclaves like Palm Beach, Fla., Nantucket, Mass., and Greenwich, Conn., WASPs are being priced out of their waterfront estates and displaced on their nonprofit boards by Jewish, Catholic and other non-Protestant entrepreneurs.
Until the early 1980s, when a flood of new wealth began to democratize the American elite, the path to power and status in America was straight and narrow. It usually began with old-line families in the lush estates of Greenwich, Boston, New York or Philadelphia and wound its way through New England boarding schools, on to Harvard or Yale and finally to the white-shoe law firms or banks of the Northeast or the corridors of power in Washington.A survey by Pew Research found only 21% of mainline U.S. Protestants had income of $100,000 or more, compared with 46% of Jews and 42% of Hindus.
John J. McCloy—the Philadelphia-born, Harvard-educated lawyer and banker who served as assistant secretary of War during World War II and on several corporate boards, including Chase Manhattan Bank's—became known as "the Chairman of the Establishment."
His son, John J. McCloy II, a Connecticut-based venture capitalist, says Ms. Kagan's nomination is a sign of the nation's commendable meritocracy, but also a "dangerous departure" from Establishment mores, since Ms. Kagan, while a brilliant scholar, has no experience as a judge.
"I think we're losing something fundamental with the Establishment," he said. "The Establishment was really about people who became leaders because they were confident and highly competent in their areas."
Yet many also point to the shifting dynamics of the faith itself, with mainline Protestantism giving way to the more fire-and-brimstone brands of Evangelicals in recent decades. The Episcopal Church, usually seen as the church of the Establishment, has seen some of the most pronounced declines in recent years.The Protestant downfall can be attributed many things: the deregulation of markets, globalization, the rise of technology, the primacy of education and skills over family connections.
Rev. Mark S. Sisk, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, said the polarized landscape of religion today hasn't favored more moderate faiths like Episcopals.
"When it comes to elective office, I can't think of anyplace in the country where being a middle-of-the-road Episcopalian would be a great plus," he said.
He added, however, that tracking the ups and downs of socioreligious groups like WASPs was no longer relevant.
"That kind of calibration of 'what members of my team are on the front lines' seems to me to be an antique kind of thing to do," he said.
Meantime, WASP culture has been left to live out its days as a fashion statement, on the shelves of Ralph Lauren stores, or as a social badge at defiantly old-world clubs like the Knickerbocker Club in New York or the Bath and Tennis Club in Palm Beach.
In "The Protestant Establishment," Mr. Baltzell pointed to the prejudice and insularity of the elite as the eventual causes of its decline. "A crisis has developed in modern America largely because of the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment's unwillingness, or inability, to share and improve its upper-class traditions by continuously absorbing talented and distinguished members of minority groups into its privileged ranks."
Jamie Johnson, the documentary filmmaker and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, said he believed the destructive effects of wealth over multiple generations were also a factor.
"The generations of affluence bred a certain kind of casual, passive approach to life and wealth building," he said. "Lots of people just got lazy."
*****
Kagan appointment shows, Jews are the new WASPs
"Behind the law are people's stories," Barack Obama said today in nominating Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court opening. He bragged on her bringing diversity and being the grandchild of immigrants, but didn't mention that she's Jewish. Already today two reporters on National Public Radio, both Jewish (I think), did. Nina Totenberg and Ari Shapiro said there will be no Protestants on the Court when John Paul Stevens leaves. Assuming Kagan gets in, there will be three Jews (all appointed by liberal Democratic presidents), and several Catholics.
The Kagan appointment means that we have entered a period in which Jews are equal members, if not actually predominant members, of the American Establishment. Obama's two closest political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, and are said to be his foreign-policy braintrust. The economy is supervised to a large degree by Jewish appointees, Larry Summers and Fed Reserve Board chair Ben Bernanke (Time's man of the year last year, a selection overseen by Rick Stengel, the Time magazine editor, who is also Jewish).
Recently a Jewish friend in the media said, "We're the new WASPs," referring to the patrician class that used to represent the elite in American society.
How did this happen and what does it mean?
Elena Kagan's parents' generation experienced anti-Semitism in seeking position, but her generation experienced no such discrimination. We exploded on to the scene in the 1970s, in the age of the "meritocracy," when test scores increasingly determined precedence.
We had certain cultural advantages for the globalized meritocracy. Jewish culture favors scholarship, close families, and abstention from alcohol. The traditional basis of advancement, attachment to the land, meant little in the new age of American professionalism. Kagan's parents were both bookish, her mother a teacher, her father a lawyer. She said today that her brothers are also public school teachers.
"Theirs was a religion oriented to continuous contact with texts: a culture of handling books, reding them, and reflecting on their messages.," Jerry Muller writes in Capitalism and the Jews. "Jews came from a culture that favored the nonviolent resolution of conflict, and that valued intellectual over physical prowess. All this was a recipe for what economists call 'cultural capital.'"
Muller also says that as an afflicted minority, Jews learned to look out for one another.
This was once a recipe for disaster. In the late 19th century, Jewish prevalence among the professions and real-estate ownership in the big central European cities of Vienna, Berlin, Prague and Budapest led to an anti-semitic reaction. Muller notes that half of Hungarian doctors, lawyers and journalists were Jewish before World War I (including, originally, Theodor Herzl).
People don't talk about Jewish achievement because they fear that doing so will breed anti-Semitic reaction. I grew up hearing that Jewish prevalence in the U.S. professions was just what it was in Europe before the Holocaust. But this is not actually true: Today in the U.S., Jewish prominence exceeds the Jewish presence in Europe, because today we are leaders in many fields, we are granted governing powers. Elena Kagan was the dean of Harvard Law School. She was succeeded by another Jewish woman.
This is a glorious Jewish and American moment. Never before in history have Jews been so included, so trusted, as we are in the U.S. People know this and accept it. Americans like Jews in powerful positions. How else do you explain the number of Jewish senators, from places like Wisconsin, Oregon, and Minnesota?
What are the consequences of this achievement? Well, for one thing, it will not last. We are now the models, and Jewish cultural gifts are transferrable. Others can cultivate habits of study. Jews are wealthy by and large--the wealthiest American group by religion, far outstripping Episcopalians--and wealth and gumption don't mix.
This moment is sure to transform Jewish life, too. No longer can Jews tell themselves, as my parents told me, that we are outsiders. We're principals in American society. We cannot claim the traditional privileges of a minority, to look out for one another. We have great responsibility for the whole society.
So this moment is going to change Jewish identity forever. It was always asserted by parochial Jews that Jews could not fully assimilate into western societies; we were not wanted. This is simply not the case any more.
The Kagan moment spells not just the end of anti-Semitism, but the end of Jewish responses to it, including the Israel lobby. Muller ends his book by suggesting that Jews should be Zionists, because Zionism was a natural nationalistic response to western nationalism that left no place for Jews. But Muller is a historian, and that is a historical judgment. That moment is over. Jews are fully empowered in the most powerful country in the world. It's time to get our heads around that fact. We have reached our rendezvous with destiny, and this means coming to terms as equals with the people whom Jews in rising have most dispossessed, Palestinians.
Michael Bess-The Dark Side of the “Good War”
Los Angeles Times, Guest Editorial
The Dark Side of the “Good War”
The Dark Side of the “Good War”
World War II is widely considered one of the most morally unambiguous military conflicts in history--the quintessential “Good War,” as journalist Studs Terkel once famously described it. And understandably so: it was a defensive war, waged against aggressor nations whose catalogue of crimes ranks extremely high, even in the most dismal annals of human nastiness.
At the same time, 60 years of research and reflection have gradually brought to light numerous aspects of this conflict that do not fit a straightforward pattern of black-and-white moral clarity. One of the challenges we face in thinking about World War II today, therefore, lies in striking a balance between two equally important imperatives. On one hand, we need to honor the memory of the soldiers and civilians who sacrificed so much to secure the Allied victory. This imperative of celebration is exemplified by such eloquent works as Tom Brokaw’sThe Greatest Generation or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Such works, not surprisingly, tend to elide the more ambiguous or morally troubling aspects of wartime, placing their accent instead on the innumerable heroic and altruistic actions, great and small, that characterized the struggle against the Axis powers.
On the other hand, we also need to strive for the most accurate and comprehensive understanding we can achieve of this far-flung conflict. This is the imperative of critical scrutiny, and it is exemplified by an equally vast body of works that focus on the more controversial aspects of wartime. Every major belligerent nation in this war pursued policies, or carried out deeds, that have come under fire since 1945; and in every nation, the debates over those wartime actions have generated bitterly contentious arguments over the nature of public memory and the meanings of national honor and dishonor. In the aftermath of all wars – and World War II is no exception – both the victors and the defeated tend to construct mythologies surrounding their wartime record, so that the moral nuances get lost.
It is only by balancing these two imperatives that we can truly do justice to the full complexity of World War II.
Here, for example, are two key wartime themes that take us in the direction of this kind of complexity.
1. The centrality of race. In the context of World War II, the word “racism” is most likely to trigger immediate associations with Nazi antisemitism and the death camps. Yet in fact, racism existed just about everywhere in the world of the 1930s and early 1940s: the entire globe was drenched in it--many different kinds of racism, with equally diverse origins and features. Rioting black GIs in Kansas, enraged at second-class treatment; Korean women forced into prostitution for Japanese troops; complacent U.S. military officers at Pearl Harbor who utterly underestimated the capabilities of the Japanese navy; Slavs murdered by Nazis in Warsaw; Filipinos in Manila massacred by the retreating Japanese garrison; emaciated white prisoners in the Japanese POW camps of Southeast Asia, where mortality rates were six times higher than in German or Italian POW camps; interned American citizens of Japanese descent--all these individuals take their place in the story of the racisms that permeated World War II, alongside the unspeakable ashes of Auschwitz.
This is by no means to imply that all these cases should be lumped together in the same category. On the contrary, each situation, each dyad of perpetrator and victim, deserves its own grim chronicle. The Holocaust stands on its own, a unique exemplar of the human capacity for industrial-strength malice. Yet it is striking, when one reflects on it, just how pervasive was the racist mentality in the 1930s and 1940s: race is arguably one of the central concepts of the entire conflagration that we call World War II, both in causing the conflict and in shaping its course.
2. The barbarization of warfare. When Japan bombed civilian populations in China during the late 1930s, the United States and Britain voiced great outrage. Franklin Roosevelt, according to his biographers, was genuinely shocked by this atrocity, and developed a far more hostile and uncompromising attitude toward Japan as a result. Newspapers in the United States and Britain issued vehement denunciations of Japan, and some politicians called for a full-scale economic embargo against this nation that practiced warfare in such a barbaric manner. This was not, in the eyes of most Brits and Americans, something that you would ever find us doing.
Scroll forward a mere seven or eight years, however, and what do we encounter? Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo--entire cities, tens of thousands of noncombatant civilians at a time, incinerated or blasted to bits under a steady torrent of British and American bombs. The large-scale killing of children, women, and old people had now become routine facets of Allied warfare.
In the firebombing of Tokyo by U.S. forces on the night of March 9, 1945, for example, the leading B-29 bombers dropped their largest M-47 incendiaries as markers to lay out a precise grid over the city center. Once those marker fires were burning, the rest of the bomber force then flew methodically back and forth over the city, filling in the grids with dense clusters of smaller incendiaries, according to a carefully thought-out pattern that ensured nothing on the ground could escape unscathed. “We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay later said. “Had to be done.”
Approximately 90,000 Japanese, most of them civilians, died that night in Tokyo.
To varying degrees, this kind of phenomenon affected all the major belligerents in World War II: atrocious behavior came to characterize “normal” warfare, not just among the Axis aggressors, but also, to a certain extent, among those nations fighting a defensive war. The strafing by British, American, or German forces of helpless sailors whose ships had been sunk; the American and Japanese practice during Pacific island combat of taking gruesome war trophies such as severed enemy body parts; the shooting of prisoners by soldiers of virtually every major belligerent power; the wholesale slaughter of civilians during military operations; the invention of fiendishly clever incendiary devices and other technologies of enhanced butchery--all these brutal realities form part of the rigorously documented history of wartime conduct on both sides of this all-out conflict.
Once again, we should not conclude from this that, because all sides did bad things, all sides end up as morally equivalent to each other when the final balance sheet is drawn. This is what Hermann Goering tried (unsuccessfully) to argue at the Nuremberg trials. On the contrary, we need to be able to make distinctions, detailing the full context and rationale for what was done in each case, and assigning appropriate moral responsibility to each nation for the policies it pursued and the choices it made.
If we do this, Germany and Japan can be clearly shown to have sunk to lower depths of barbarity during this war than the Anglo-Americans or even than the Russians. Anglo-American strategic bombing – even in those unjustifiable cases when it needlessly slaughtered noncombatants – still formed part of a military campaign aimed at destroying the German and Japanese ability to wage war. By contrast, the Nazi death camps and the Japanese massacres of civilians in cities like Manila yielded no military advantage whatsoever. They amounted to nothing more than gratuitous murder on a colossal scale.
My underlying point here is straightforward. There is such a thing as a just war; but even in such a war, significant evil deeds and good deeds often can still be observed on all sides. We can draw usefully here on the distinction between jus ad bellum (the moral justification for starting a war) as opposed to jus in bello (the moral assessment of conduct during wartime): the fact that a nation is fighting a justifiable war of self-defense does not exempt it from moral accountability for the means it adopts and the deeds it does in its struggle to win.
The Allied nations certainly have much to be proud of, as they look back over World War II: the Allied cause in this war was a morally legitimate one--defense against unprovoked aggression by tyrannical nations. Our troops exhibited extraordinary bravery and self-sacrifice, across the whole broad canvas of the war over six years and countless theaters of combat. Where Anglo-American armies marched in, they arrived as liberators, and treated the local populations with decency and propriety. (This cannot be said, of course, for our Soviet allies.) In victory, the Brits and Yanks showed remarkable generosity toward the defeated peoples; in the aftermath of war, they paved the way for a major resurgence of democratic practices and values in many parts of the world.
But as the two themes of racism and barbarization discussed above suggest, even this quintessential “Good War” proved to be, in the final analysis, a morally complicated event. We should take pleasure in celebrating the memory of those who sacrificed so much in defending our freedom. At the same time, our mythology surrounding World War II--and warfare in general--needs to move beyond the facile imagery of pure goodness confronting pure evil in a pure contest with a pure outcome: such rectitude exists only on movie screens, not in the real world where we all live our daily lives.
Michael Bess is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University. His new book, Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Yugoslavia, 1945-1953-The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War
|
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)