History Forum / General / General Topics / December 2006

Rather funny, and mostly accurate:

Why I Hate WW II
By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru )

FRESNO -- Everybody's mad because Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie, Flags of
Our Fathers, bombed. I read this one review that said every citizen
ought to go pay to sit through it even if it is a bad movie, like it's
some kind of patriotic duty for me to put $25 in Clint Eastwood's
offshore account. (And yeah, I know movies don't cost $25 but I can't
sit down in a darkened room unless I've got a Humpback-size diet coke
in one hand, a Maxi-tub popcorn in the other, and a spare clip of Milk
Duds in my ammo pocket.)

I've got my own theory about why all these WW II movies went down in
flames like Zeros in the Marianas Turkey Shoot: because WW II is way
overrated. Next to the guy who directed Pearl Harbor, the men who set
that war in motion and made all the decisions from 1939-1945 were the
biggest idiots in history. And that's why all the lessons of WW II,
everything it's supposed to teach us, is either dead wrong or as
obvious as a ballpeen hammer in your face, so obvious that even Barney
could teach it to his diaper demographic between commercial breaks.

The biggest lie about WW II is that it was a war between good and evil.
Bullshit, because there were no good European countries.

Fact No1: They Were ALL Fascists. At a military level, let's face a
nasty fact: WW II was Stalin vs. Hitler. The rest was window dressing.
Stalin won because--because what, he was a nicer guy? Nope, he won
because his brand of fascism was actually way more ruthless and bloody
and effective than Hitler's smalltime snobbery, and because Stalin had
the whole US industrial machine backing him. There's no moral lesson in
that that I can see.

Of course, most of these WW II fans try real hard not to think about
Stalin, so they prefer to think about Britain and the rest of Western
Europe. Those are officially the good guys. Well, got some bad news for
you: they were all fascists too, just weaker than Stalin and Hitler,
more sly and suckup-y. The only lesson they've got to offer is that if
you want to survive, start out as a raving fascist and when that
becomes uncool, turn coward and start pretending you were always in
favor of niceness.

Europe before Stalingrad was an alien planet, as crazy and bloodthirsty
as any Aztec priest. Nobody realizes the complete flip-flop Europe did
in 1945. Before that, it was a continent full of insane fascists. Some
were braver, better soldiers, or smarter; those are the only real
differences.

And when I say "smarter," I don't want to overdo it, because the
Greatest Generation was a bunch of morons. Hitler was the stupidest of
all, I grant you that, but he was just the standout in graduating class
full of mongoloids in fedoras. Take Churchill, who's supposed to be a
God of courage and decency and smarts. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Churchill
was a buffoon. He was the moron who got Allied armies into useless
Mediterranean campaigns in both World Wars. Gallipoli had Churchill's
autograph all over it, and he was so stupid he tried the same crap 25
years later with the Italian adventure. He had this obsession with the
"soft underbelly of Europe" which conveniently forgot about these
things called "mountain ranges," like the Alps and the Apennines.

There's another inconvenient fact about Churchill: he was a fascist
too, every bit as much as Hitler. Only thing is, you can't blame him
much for that, because, and I want y'all to listen up here, everybody
in Europe was a fascist until 1943--if they were quick on the uptake
enough to see the Wehrmacht was doomed--or 1944, by which time it was
obvious even to the moron majority that fascism was now officially
taboo. I repeat: everybody in Europe. Fascist to the core.

Churchill's one and only reason for fighting Hitler was that he didn't
want Germany challenging England for world domination. In 1936,
Churchill told a British general, "Germany is getting too strong; we
must smash her." That was his only objection to the Nazis. No way he
could have minded their brutality, because Churchill was always in
favor of violence against anybody who opposed British interests. Long
before the war, he supported using concentration camps for the Boer
women and kids, strafing Indian villages--and here's his enlightened
democratic quote on how to deal with the Iraqi Kurds, everybody's
favorite persecuted minority, from a 1919 memo: "I am strongly in
favour of using poisoned [sic] gas against uncivilized tribes."

That doesn't make him a bad guy; it just makes him a standard European,
pre-1945. They were all like that, only more so. You can go down the
list of European countries and come up with a list of homegrown fascist
parties, all totally popular and democratic, that make the Nazis look
like squeamish moderates. Some of them, like the Iron Guard in Romania,
make even me flinch.

And if we rotate the globe, voila!: the Asian theatre also turns out to
be a classic battle of fascism vs...more fascism. The Imperial Japanese
military caste was beyond fascist. Seriously, they were so hardcore
that it was taboo even to suggest the possibility of anything going
wrong with the grand plan for total victory, which is why nobody dared
to develop anything resembling a strategic plan. That was a good way to
get yourself hacked into Kobe beef. The Japanese brass responded like
Travis Bickle to questions like that: "You talkin' to us? You askin' us
that question? Cuz we don't see any other Japanese brass around
here..." Cut to: arterial sprays where the insolent questioner used to
be.

And in the opposite corner: Chiang Kai Shek, the Asian Churchill: a
totally incompetent military leader and lifelong fascist who saw how
the wind was blowing and repackaged himself as a crusader for democracy
in order to get aid from the gullible Americans. Chiang only valued one
thing: obedience. And he only trusted one guy: himself. That's why he
personally held 82 official positions in China, including head of all
the armed services. He picked his generals for their incompetence,
because he suspected that talented men might turn against him. Any sign
of independent thinking, never mind criticism, meant the chop, and I
mean that literally. Chiang even had himself declared the head of the
Chinese Boy Scouts, that breeding ground of coups. That was the Good
Guy of the Asian theatre. Oh wait, I'm forgetting Mao, another champion
of human rights.

Even the noncombatant states were fascist before the Marshall Plan
showed dictators that there was more profit in talking nice. Countries
tried to copy the big, bad fascists with little comedy monsters of
their own, like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic or Peron in
Argentina. And in their humble way, all these guys did their best to do
their worst. Trujillo actually tried to prove that the Dominicans were
the lost tribe of Aryanism, and ordered something like 30,000 Haitian
immigrants hacked to death with machetes for being "black." Even the
Mexicans tried to do the Fascist two-step, only being Mexican they went
for the gaudiest color they could find, so while Germany had the
brownshirts and Mussolini had the blackshirts, Mexico came up
with...the Gold Shirts! "And put some frilly cuffs on that while you're
at it!"

After Stalingrad, the world's fascists just figured out that if you
wanted to win, you needed US backing like Stalin got, and that meant
you needed a cleaner line of patter than the Nazis and Japanese used.
Those hick Jerries and Japs talked death, skulls, slaughter,
suicide--tsk tsk, way uncool. Stalin, on the other hand, talked peace,
friendship between peoples, justice for the working class...and not
only killed far more civvies than Hitler did but got funded for it by
the American taxpayer. It was the original no-brainer--which was lucky
because this was the Dumbest Generation since the Thirty Years War.

Fact No2: The Holocaust is a One-Shot Exception; Genocide DOES Pay.

The Holocaust is the next-biggest non-lesson of WW II. Everybody loves
to talk about this particular case of genocide because it failed, or so
we're told. The Germans paid a terrible price for what they did to the
Jews. Nope; the Germans paid a terrible price for invading Russia. If
they'd stuck to holding their half of Eurasia, Stalin would have
continued his love affair with Hitler, the only human being he ever
liked, and the European Jews would have been a shared buffet, divvied
up between concentration camps flying the swastika or the red star.

What made the Holocaust totally unlike most genocides is that we
remember the victims; and the only reason we do is, once again, the
USA. The European Jews were totally vulnerable and despised over there,
but their kin in America were doing fine and cared enough to remember
their relatives who died. Compare this to almost any other example of
genocide, and there are literally thousands of examples, and you'll see
the difference: most of the time (I mean DUH!) the tribe that gets
genocided is the most despised, weak and helpless tribe in the region.
That means nobody remembers them at all, or if they do they consider
the genocide an example of Progress, or just one of those things. If
you doubt that, then tell me quick what tribe lived 400 years ago in
the city where you're reading this now. I still, after years of trying
to find out, don't know what tribe lived around Fresno. Nobody even
mentions them on the web--that's how most genocides work. The tribe
vanishes forever. That's why they call it genocide, for God's sake! And
once it's gone--Duh!--nobody remembers it or cares.

The reason people love to talk about Nazis killing Jews is that, thanks
to the Jews in America, there were people who insisted on remembering
the victims. If people thought about the genocide of, say, the tribe
that lived where you lived, they'd get bummed. They'd realize the world
is a slaughterhouse and there are no moral lessons. That's why they'd
rather talk about Auschwitz than...Fresno.

Fact No3: There Are NO Military Lessons to Be Learned from WW II

This is my real pet peeve about WW II, because frankly I care way more
about bad military history than all that moral bla-bla. Every military
lesson people WANT to take away from WW II is wrong, and the one they
COULD learn is the one they don't want to learn.

So for starters, here's the real lesson of the war: military
superiority in the narrow sense isn't nearly as important as economic
strength and propaganda working in tandem.

Now that is a real depressing lesson for all military buffs, and one
that took me years to accept, but we have to face it. If military
superiority settled things, the Germans and Japanese would have won
because they were by far, and I mean by FAR, the best soldiers. A
military historian with the unlucky name of Nutter has done a really
good job of demolishing the hometown writers who try to assert that
allied troops came close to Wehrmacht soldiers in combat power. I'll
leave it to him to deal with diehard Greatest Generation fans:
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/introduction.aspx

Until Hitler poured its strength out on the Russian wasteland the
Wehrmacht had total supremacy. Once you realize that you can drop a lot
of myths, such as the crap that the French were cowards and the Brits
brave heroes. The French lost because they had a land border with
Germany, period. The British Army did as badly or worse than the French
in combat with the Wehrmacht during the invasion of France, and
survived for one reason: Hitler, the moron, had this idea that Britain
would stand with him against Bolshevism when the Brits came to their
senses, so he cancelled the invasion, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. If
the invasion had gone ahead, Churchill's speech about fighting them on
the beaches, etc., would have had a sequel: "We shall fight them on the
beaches...for about ten minutes. We shall fight them in the hills...for
about a week," and so on.

The key military struggle of the war was on the plains of Russia, and
Hitler lost not because he was evil--what, Stalin wasn't just as
evil?--but because he was too much of a snobby hick idiot to look for
allies. If he'd courted the Belorussians, Ukrainians, Poles, the
peasant landholders forced onto kolkhozes and all the other anti-Commie
groups in Eastern Europe he'd have won hands down. And if Stalin had
been one smidgen LESS evil, he'd have lost anyway. Stalin won because
his soldiers were way more afraid of the NKVD than the Nazis. If a
Russian soldier was captured, he was considered a traitor. If he
retreated, the commissars were waiting to shoot him. If he bitched,
he'd have his fingernails removed and end up begging to be shot.

So the real legacy of this shitty war was a Soviet world, where the way
to win is to mix propaganda about love and peace for grabbing US tax
dollars with a new kind of violence, a mean cowardly kind that happened
in Moscow basement interrogation cells, with 70-year sentences to
Office World as the alternative for us lucky Fresno-ites.

Everything they told you is wrong. Everything you believe is wrong, and
worse than that--it's dull, too. At least the fascists tried to make it
interesting for us non-execs, non-surfers, non-golfers. They were
brutal scum, sure...but I have to ask, "compared to who--YOU a.sholes?"

---------

BM