THE "GOOD" WAR:

Clash Of Evils (ADAM KIRSCH, September 5, 2007, NY Sun)

"No Simple Victory" (Viking, 490 pages, $30), Mr. Davies's new book, is the latest installment in his project of illusion-demolition. This is a revisionist history of World War II, designed to shake the complacency of British and American readers who are accustomed to thinking of it as "the good war." It is not that Mr. Davies has uncovered any important new facts, or even launched any shocking reinterpretations. His purpose, rather, is to remind the world of two truths that, while well-established, he believes are not sufficiently reckoned with.

The first is that, in military terms, World War II in Europe was predominantly a war between Germany and the Soviet Union; the contributions of Britain and America, while crucial, were not of the same order. The second is that, when Nazism and Communism fought over control of Eastern Europe, there was little moral difference between them. The Soviet Union was one of the Allies, but it had less in common with Anglo-American democracy than it did with Nazi tyranny. [...]

Mr. Davies's second major contention is that Nazi barbarism, which the world is accustomed to hearing about, must be set alongside the Stalinist barbarism that Allied propaganda assiduously concealed. "All sound moral judgments," he writes, "operate on the basis that the standards applied to one side of a relationship must be applied to all sides. It is not acceptable that certain acts by an ill-favored party be condemned as Â'foul murder' if similar acts by a more favored party be somehow excused or overlooked."

It follows that Mr. Davies argues against what he calls the "Allied Scheme of History," which portrays the alliance of the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans as a unified "anti-Fascist" struggle. Americans, especially, are inclined to this view, since our memory of World War II usually begins at Pearl Harbor, six months after Hitler invaded Russia and turned the Soviet Union into an enemy. But as Mr. Davies reminds us, the first act of the war was the joint invasion of Poland by Hitler and Stalin, and for two years thereafter, the totalitarian dictators worked in tandem to achieve their goals. Early in 1940, in fact, Britain and France considered sending an expeditionary force to Finland to fight the Soviet invasion.

After Operation Barbarossa Â-- the code name for the German invasion of Russia Â-- the Soviet Union officially became one of the Allies. But the evil of Stalin's regime, while it was decently forgotten in the West, did not diminish in wartime. On the contrary, the Red Army was in some ways the natural culmination of the communist experiment, which had already militarized society and treated human lives as means to an end.

After Stalin's own incompetence prevented the Red Army from anticipating the German invasion, the Soviet Union could only compensate for huge initial losses by treating its soldiers as cannon fodder, overwhelming the Germans with sheer numbers. Soviet commanders wasted lives in a way that no American general would even have considered. It was necessary to deploy "blocking regiments" behind the front lines, expressly tasked with shooting any comrade who tried to retreat.

Worse, because totally irrational, the Soviet state continued to destroy its own people even when the war was at its height. During the first year of the invasion, the Red Army issued 800,000 death sentences to its own soldiers. Every unit had its commissar, who had to countersign all military orders, and who could condemn anyone to death for an impolitic word. No wonder that, as Mr. Davies writes, "the front-line zone of maximum physical danger" became for the Red Army troops "a zone of psychological liberation, even of gay abandon, which no doubt contributed to the willingness of the Â'Ivans' to rush to their deaths with a hurrah on their lips."

For Iraq to be as tragic a loss as WWII was we'd basically have to willingly turn it over to Syria, along with the rest of the Middle East (especially Israel), half of Africa, etc.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2007 7:33 AM