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Some Myths of the Struggle Against Fascism
| Article
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11921 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
7,359 Words |
| Author
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Alan J. Levine
Alan J. Levine is a historian specializing in twentieth-
century international relations and the author of From the
Normandy Beaches to the Baltic Sea. |
More than forty years after he destruction of fascism as a serious political force, World War II and the struggles that preceded it remain a subject of interest and of mythmaking. The war against European fascist and Japanese imperialist powers is still a potent source of real and supposed lessons, metaphors and comparisons. Although a bit worn by overuse, words like fascist, Nazi, appeaser, and the like, even when irrelevant or ridiculously out of place, still retain emotional impact. They remain "fighting words," favored even by those seeking to obliterate the distinction between the two sides in World War II.
The mythology of the fight against fascism forms two broad currents. One tendency, and still by far the dominant one, romanticizes and simplifies the struggle, often to the point that it resembles an episode in a comic book rather than a real historical event. A far less influential tendency attempts to cynicize the war. Norman Podhoretz aptly dubbed this process the "Vietnamization of World War II," since a major component of this view is the projection of the Vietnam War, or more accurately, the fashionable image of that war, onto the earlier conflict. To those most fanatically imbued with a hatred of their own society--perhaps with a bleak view of man and the world in general--it seems to be emotionally important to prove that the United States and the other Western democracies were not worth defending, even against fascism. Occasionally, these groups have made use of reactionary or isolationist myths (e.g., the recurrent and repeatedly refuted charge the Roosevelt conspired to have Pearl Harbor bombed by the Japanese.)
Although the appearance of such views is symptomatic of the disintegration of moral standards and a shared worldview, on the whole their presence has probably not affected people's attitudes very much. Left-wing attempts to impeach the war against the European Axis powers have failed, just as "right-wing" versions of World War II (such as the one presented in David Irving's Hitler's War) have failed. The rejection of moral values involved in accepting claims that World War II, particularly its European phase, was unjust or unnecessary has, so far, been too unpleasant for most people to embrace. In any event, it is too lacerating to the self-image, or even the vested interests, of too many people. Moreover, vivid images evoked by the war during the 1930s and 1940s are too politically useful to dispense with entirely. It is simpler to make use of them, to adapt them to some current purpose, particularly for the Left. As conservative observer James Burnham put it, "Modern liberalism reached what historians of the future will define as its zenith during the struggle against Hitler's Nazism
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