Facing the Goebbels-like propaganda — Moral-Historical observations
Americans have not withstood a real war, in which the fate of the nation is in the balance and the human suffering and material cost are making everything else marginal, since 1865. In a real total war, a nation does not continue its commercial activities and cultural life nearly as usual — as it was for the U.S. during WWI and even thorough WWII.
The war in Europe was fought between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with a supporting cast of the U.S., Great Britain and few others. If not for the Red Army — which Putin has absolutely no ground to appropriate its heritage for justifying the invasion of Ukraine and, in parallel, T. Snyder and his followers despicably debase Soviet’s heroism and sacrifices in a Goebbels-like re-writing of history — winning the “Great Patriotic War”, then the Third Reich would have achieved a Global Hegemony. Swastikas' hegemony that would have horribly felt by most of the human race as a thousand years of doom and European Jewry would have been exterminated.
Personal note: the Red Army’s soldiers saved my mother, who lost all of her extended family to the genocidal Nazis, after suffering horrific years all alone as a young girl. My father, who also lost all of his extended family to the genocidal Nazis, was sent by the N.K.V.D., in May 1941, to a camp in Siberia (being a “foreign intellectual”) and after about a year of imprisonment managed to escape all the way to Uzbekistan. There he joined the Red Army until the victory. They won the war. As historical ironies go, I fought the Red Army “advisers” to the Egyptian Army on the canal Suez during the Attrition War, and if I was living in Putin’s Russia I most probably would not been alive or at least imprisoned.
In May 1945, looking eastward, the Soviet soldier who stood on top of the Reichstag would see an incomparable loss of human life and an enormous destruction of science, technology and property. Before him would have stretched a vast land that almost all its reservoirs of materials and its growth engines were ruined to near oblivion by the fighting armies. Looking westward, however, he would have seen the great wheels of American industry churning in full force after being rescued from the Great Depression by the war, ready to fulfill the American insatiable demand for consumption and to support Western Europe (first of all, Germany) on its way to Democracy, Market Capitalism and NATO. Ushering the American Century.
Now, all over Eastern Europe, especially in Ukraine and Poland, the memorials for the Red Army victory over the Nazi armies are being cheerfully destroyed as if they are the symbols of Communist evil mercilessly occupying the innocent peaceful people of the Blood Lands between Bandera’s Kiev and Hitler’s Berlin. For me, a ghastly scene of the debasement of the destroyers of Hitler’s armies is from the recent past (2014). A photo in which a crowd at a square in a western Ukrainian city is enthusiastically toppling a statue of a Soviet fighter. The battle-uniformed soldier is holding up a baby, in memory of the Red Army millions (including Ukrainians) who died for the victory that drove the Nazi legions out of Ukraine all the way to Berlin.
As I wrote constantly, the Ukraine war erupted by American appalling triumphalism (exploiting Gorbachev’s Universal revolution like a greedy “Masters of the Universe”) breeding Russian unproportionally executed and misdirected destructive aggressiveness (to the point when one can feature a future historian, and there’ll be one, wondering whether Putin was a C.I.A. asset, as Zelensky). For America, until now, the results are the NATOization of the EU, the revamping of the economy by increased defense spending and the dollar is ruling the markets. NO wonder the calls for a negotiated settlement are drowned by the “Battle of our Time” jingoistic howls. However, there is a non-negligible probability that Clio will not be that forgiving this time around, and Americans will get to experience a Real Global War.