Whenever I read about WWII, I am reminded of how insulting the Bush administration's characterization of "Old" Europe is. It's a characterization that usually envelopes the United Nations and other agencies, economies, and governments that have been dwarfed by the military superiority of the United States.
America has never known suffering on the same scale as the war that was fought most viciously in and around Europe from 1939 to 1945, and yet Bush and his supporters dismiss Europe as some kind of antiquated civilization because it doesn't eagerly jump at every opportunity to ignite a conflagration. Europe's reluctance to wage cynical wars for imperialistic ends couldn't possibly have something to do with their relatively recent proximity to devastation like America has never known, could it?
Europe is by no means perfect. But the American characterization of Europe as "yesterday's empire," as the place where people just don't have the gonads to wage war, completely avoids some of the real reasons European countries may not gleefully follow Bush's marauding ways (aside from the widespread disdain for American culture). A NY Times piece on the war in Russia in WWII is the kind of "real reasons" I am referring to:
The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly the most ferocious ever fought. The armies struggled over vast territory. The front extended 1,900 miles (greater than the distance from the northern border of Maine to the southern tip of Florida), and German troops advanced over 1,000 miles into Soviet territory (equivalent to the distance from the East Coast to Topeka, Kan.). And they clashed in a seemingly unrelenting series of military operations of unparalleled scale; the battle of Kursk alone, for instance, involved 3.5 million men.
In short, the war fought on the Eastern Front is arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history — but it is a chapter that in many essential ways is only now being written. From evidence released from Soviet archives since the mid-1980's, scholars have learned, for example, that Soviet deaths numbered nearly 50 million, two and half times the original estimate; that the Red Army raped two million German women during their occupation to wreak revenge; and that an astonishing 40 percent of Soviet wartime battles were for deacdes lost to history.
Bush and many Americans treated 9/11 as if it had changed the course of history, as if life for the whole planet would never be the same, as if no horrors in history could compare with the loss of 3,000 American lives.
But can anyone honestly say, after looking at a figure like "50 million" Soviet deaths, that 9/11 should be anything more than a footnote in the history books? Naturally, it won't, since the people who shape our perception of history and create the climate in which history is disseminated have too much invested in promoting 9/11 as a great calamity in the history of the world, much like they can refer to a reception in football or a home run in baseball as a "miracle." The same people and the climate in which they operate has generated thousands of lines of newspaper copy over an exposed breast.
I'm not referring to the Bush administration or Republicans alone. The kind of self-serving hyperbole that surrounds 9/11 emanates from many places within American culture and abroad, and other cultures have their own 9/11-type events to mythologize. Occasionally, an article like the one mentioned above recalls the scope and horror of nationalistic atrocities. One can only hope that the propaganda of 9/11 will give way to a more sober analysis of its place in history, for the American example as it stands is playing out much like the historical whitewash of Stalinist Russia:
The Soviets also buried the history of the Eastern Front. Soviet military historians turned out accurate and detailed work, but since they could analyze only what Soviet officials permitted them to write about, they skirted, or, more significantly, ignored those facts and events the government considered embarrassing. Soviet propaganda, meanwhile, lionized the heroes of the "Great Patriotic War."
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