Was World War 2 Really ‘The Good War’?
Critic calls my grandfathers and other servicemen fools. My response...
I received an angry reply in response to my recent post I Need to Get Back to the War and I wanted to address it in the spirit of healthy intellectual discourse.
The objection appears to have been to my characterization of what my grandfathers did in the Pacific as ‘serving their country’, and the comment goes:
“Served in the pacific? As in fighting for the demons currently in power, not ‘their countries’. It matters not what they were told, and foolishly believed in, it matters what they actually did and there was NOTHING good about that war and how it turned out, that should be obvious.”
To give further context, I also noted in my article:
I have in recent times become skeptical about the so-called Good War. The more one learns about the international banking interests that lurk behind its origins, the more one begins to draw dingy parallels with our current paradigm.
But regardless of the machinations of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, it remains a reasonable proposition that to have lost the way of life our grandparents enjoyed in places like Britain, Australia, and New Zealand in favour of Nazi or Imperial Japanese rule would have been tragic and ignominious. So I must continue to believe that for all the questions which surround WWII and its genesis, it was ultimately a noble struggle.
In this respect it would seem that my critic and I are at least partially on the same page. I am under no illusion that the puppet masters of the Second World War – whether German, British, American or otherwise – were noble men, with high ideals and steadfast convictions, at least no convictions other than the relentless pursuit of power and wealth at any cost to humanity.
I am not that naïve, and if we are to evaluate a war’s virtue in the context of the motivations of those who engineered it, then I will categorically state that there has NEVER been a ‘Good War’.
I agree with my heckler that the people who run the world are evil – indeed, demons, if you will. Furthermore, they always have been.
But where, then, does that leave us? It brings us up against one of the oiliest words in the English language: SHOULD.
My adversary appears to be stating, and not without good cause, that World War 2 should not have been fought; that my grandfathers and all the millions of other servicemen were misled, and that the world would be a better place now had none of it ever occurred.
I get it. I really do. Like I said: The more one learns about the international banking interests that lurk behind [WW2’s] origins, the more one begins to draw dingy parallels with our current paradigm.
But I ask again. Where does that leave us?
Bad things should never happen? Bad men should not be followed into war?
I have pondered this for some days and as yet fail to see what alternative my critic is proposing with regard to fighting the Second World War.
If we accept, which I do, that those behind the War were effectively demons, then to say they should never have done the things they did is asinine. Demons are going to do what demons always do. The concept of should does not come into it.
So where do we go from there? The Germans should not have followed Hitler to war? Okay, but they did… and when one makes even a rudimentary study of post-WW1 history one can begin to understand why – three words my friends: Treaty of Versailles.
So where now? My grandfathers and the men of the British Commonwealth and the USA should not have taken up arms to thwart the Axis?
Okay, let’s play that one out. Let’s say there had been a mass awakening of some kind like, oh I don’t know, I guess Jesus coming back would have been the only thing capable of such a groundswell in the 1940s. Let’s say Jesus had come back and said, “Okay guys, cool your jets. All the people behind this war – including your own leaders and captains of industry, not just the Germans – are a pack of rotters. They’re all bad eggs and they’re only doing this for money and power. Best stay home and let Hitler have at it. Stalin kind of has it coming anyway according to the old man upstairs.”
Let’s say that happened, and they all listened to him, because most were good Godfearing men in those days. What then?
Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s no solution here (unless you wanted Hitler to win).
This is the problem with the word SHOULD. It is a moral judgment based on right and wrong.
Do we know right from wrong? On a day-to-day basis? Yes, we do – God has endowed us with this understanding, it is what separates us from beasts. But do we know right from wrong at a macro geopolitical level? That one’s not quite so easy – as has once again been aptly demonstrated by our collective experience of the past few years. Some of us saw the con, but most did not, and still don’t.
The problem with the word SHOULD, outside of the common decencies of day-to-day life (don’t steal people’s stuff, don’t screw your buddy’s wife, don’t kill people, etc), is that it moves swiftly into the realm of utopia.
And utopian thinking is, as we should all know by now, as direct a road to hell as the warlike machinations of any nefarious elite.
What we are dealing with here is the problem of imperfection. Chaos. It is simply the way of the universe – whether or not one believes in God.
Of course World War 2 should not have happened. It was a giant demonic blood sacrifice if nothing else. But not to have fought it? Where would that have left us?
It is obvious, again even with a cursory understanding of military history, that had the Commonwealth and the USA not joined forces against the Axis, then the Third Reich would have subsumed Europe and the central Asian land mass, and the Empire of Japan would have taken control of Southeast Asia and the Pacific – and both would likely still dominate these regions to this day. In effect, German National Socialism and hardline Japanese militarism would rule the world.
Now, it is possible, as I alluded above, that the person who left the comment which sparked my response here is of the National Socialist persuasion – there are certainly plenty of them out there; I have even spoken with them from time to time on Telegram and places like that. They are an impassioned lot with plenty to say about plenty of things, but the common themes are that the Jews started the war, and that Germany should have won it (and would have, if it hadn’t been for the Jews and, as such, the Holocaust should have happened – but it didn’t).
“…There was NOTHING good about that war and how it turned out” my heckler says. Well, I can understand how an NSDAP sympathizer would have that view. But I am not in the business of assuming anyone’s political philosophy based off one comment. And to be frank, I believe that even Nazis deserve the courtesy of a reasoned response.
And so, my response is: If one believes the world would be a better place had Germany and Japan won that war, then we will have to agree to disagree.
Even at the most basic selfish level – had this been the case, I would probably not exist. New Zealand, where my parents were born, would have become a Japanese colony by the mid-1940s, meaning my grandparents would likely never have gotten together – we’ve all seen Back to the Future… you know how it goes.
And even if they had, and my parents had still somehow paired up, how different would my life be in 2023? How different would it be now for all we of the conquered countries whose grandfathers did not go off and fight?
I know enough about what went on in Germany and Japan, and the countries they conquered the 1930s and 40s to know that I prefer the life that I’ve been afforded under the Western liberal democracy model – for all its many faults.
Were my grandfathers misled? Did they foolishly believe propaganda? I think so. And I like to think that with the informational tools available to us today we can perhaps hold those demons who run the world to greater account and avoid some of the pitfalls that our ancestors marched into – like staying the hell out of Ukraine for instance.
But in the final analysis, I still categorise what my grandads did in the War as ‘serving their country’.
Is this definition fraught with conundrum? It certainly is.
I used to have a warm fuzzy feeling about World War 2 – the documentaries, the dramatisations, the legend and the lore of the whole thing was my number-one fascination from early childhood until very recently. In fact, just this last week I binge-watched Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance for about the fourth time (that’s over 40 hours of TV); I’ve also read both books three times.
I still enjoy these sweeping sagas, these heroic tales of men like my grandfathers and the women they loved – but I must sadly admit, they don’t ring so true anymore. I can glimpse the propaganda lurking between the frames; I can hear the rattle of the historians’ typewriters, as they slant the narrative in a direction favourable to the Military Industrial Complex so presciently warned about by one of the War’s very own stalwart luminaries – General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It's like Ali Campbell sang in “Higher Ground”:
Every hour of every day, I'm learning more
The more I learn, the less I know about before
The less I know, the more I wanna look around
Digging deep for clues on higher ground.
In this manner the machine continues to ruin things for me – my favourite bands, actors and movies, and even history itself. The world is indeed run by demons, and most of the time it’s all we can do to simply be decent to one another, let alone figure out what’s going on behind closed doors in the corridors of power and react accordingly.
Very few things are black and white, but one fact about the universe remains true – horrible, evil things should not happen, but they do, and they always will. It’s a mess that we’re stuck with trying to untangle, no less so now than it was for all our ancestors who fought and died for the tyrants and potentates throughout history.
There may well have been ‘nothing good about that war’, but on the question of how it turned out, I’m not so sure. And on the question of what my grandads ‘actually did’? I believe that they believed if they did not fight then their homes and their way of life may have been lost forever. And despite all the conundrums, and even despite my disillusionment with the WW2 legend, I remain inclined to agree with them.
I have given the question honest academic consideration to avoid reacting emotionally, but I’d like to continue thinking of my grandfathers as heroes for now. Is that okay?