The Good War

First, read this post by the formidable Brian at Peeve Farm.

I've thought about this a bit myself. Here's my (somewhat edited) response to Brian:

I'm of the opinion that the modern Left loves to reverently invoke WW2 because its a safe way to claim they're not completely out to lunch when it comes to national defense and related issues. See, they can say, we were all for fighting Hitler!

It also doesn't hurt that the Nazis were/are the perfect foes for the Left, whose hive mind is notoriously emotion-ruled. Hitler and the gang were downright demonic - right out of Central Casting - and made to order.

The Nazis were also, let's not forget, the target of the "anti-fascist" united front preached by the CPSU and picked up by the American Left, echoes of which can be heard to this day in the Leftist habit of calling anyone to the right of them a "fascist." This is just plain weird, as the Bolsheviks were at least as fascistic as the NSDAP. Yet how many Leftists, past or present, would equate the Hammer & Sickle with the Swastika as a symbol of evil and oppression?

Of course, when Stalin and Hitler kissed and made up (with the corpse of Poland as a token of mutual friendship), most of the American and European Left turned on a dime and, well, so much for the united front.

I can't help wondering... if WW2 had never happened, and a Nazi-Bolshevik entente had gone on to swallow up most of Eurasia into totalitarian darkness, would the contemporary American Left still use "Nazi!" as their epithet of choice? Would "progressives" regard the Final Solution with the same almost-total silence and willful ignorance displayed whenever the subject of Communist mass-murder came up? Hmm. Topic for another day, I suppose.

There is also the issue of phony courage, something near and dear to many "progressives." Hating the Nazis and celebrating their destruction was the safest political stance once could take in the post-1945 era. In the past 200 years, no regime has ever been as comprehensively liquidated as that of the Third Reich. Even the most recent pre-Hitler European conqueror - Napoleon - escaped with his life and one of his Field Marshals founded a royal dynasty in Sweden!

The Swastikettes, on the other hand, were hung, shot, driven to suicide or chased to the ends of the Earth. GOOD, says I. But the point is that dancing on the grave of Nazism and idolizing the war that dug that grave was a pretty risk-free activity after WW2; no matter what you said about the Nazis, there was very little chance that Otto Skorzeny was going to show up at your door with a Luger.

On the other hand, being comprehensively opposed to tyranny - you know, like a true classical liberal - was another kettle of fish entirely. As we both know, a regime just as bad as Hitler's survived the war and its blood-soaked leaders mostly died in bed (unless killed by each other or by Stalin, the worst snake in the nest).

Add to this the decades-long, collective admiration and apologia by "progressives" for the Soviet State - for most of this period, 'Kremlin' was to 'Leftist' as 'Mafia' was to 'gambling' - and the right-thinking Leftist had a real dilemma.

Solution? More WW2 nostalgia, please. Big Red was an ally, the evil Nazis were the foe, and everything was ideologically comfortable.

Let's also not forget to notice the prevalence of the European theater over the Pacific in such nostalgia - even though we fought the Japanese for longer than the Germans. The German Nazis, being Caucasians (indeed, fancying themselves the Whitest of the White) pass the PC test whereas the Asian Japanese make for a somewhat less comfortable foe for the Sensitive.

There's also that messy Atom Bomb thing. And in terms of snappy uniforms, it's no contest.