The Good War

Adam Kirsch has a piece in the New York Times on the changing historiography of World War II:

And if the main show was a war between Hitler and Stalin, [Norman Davies] wonders, wasn’t World War II a clash of nearly equivalent evils? “Anyone genuinely committed to freedom, justice and democracy is duty-bound to condemn both of the great totalitarian systems without fear or favor,” he concludes. As a historian of Poland, Davies is especially aware of what few Americans remember: that World War II began with a joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of that country. For the first two years of the war, Hitler and Stalin were allies; the fact that they then turned against each other, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, doesn’t change the moral equation. “If one finds two gangsters fighting each other, it is no valid approach at all to round on one and to lay off the other. The only valid test is whether or not they deserve the label of gangsters."

I read Professor Davies' book (I've actually read all his books), and I found it a much needed corrective to the hagiography that passes for histories of World War II in America. The war in Europe really was a clash between two totalitarians for dominion, with a small sideline playing out in western Europe, and no side came out smelling like roses.

What's the point of this sort of revisionism? World War II is the paradigmatic good war. Our enemies were as wicked as can be imagined, started the war themselves, and refused to surrender until the very end. A more perfect test case for the possibility of moral warfare cannot be imagined. And even under these ideal circumstances, the war was unconscionably destructive, killing upwards of one hundred million people. Both sides massacred civilians, both sides interned suspected internal enemies in camps, and at the end of the war more Europeans were living under totalitarianism than were when the war started. Even given the perfect enemy- and what enemy could be more perfect than the Nazis- the decision to wage war remains morally questionable, with complex, ethically murky outcomes.

The Nazis were a uniquely wicked foe. We have not faced one like them before or since. If war failed even that perfect test case, how much stronger should the presumption against war be! We examine and re-examine the struggle against the Nazis not to cast aspersions on those who came before, but to illuminate the path ahead. If the value of a war against Hitler turns out to be questionable, what does that tell us about our other wars?