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Notes -
None whatsoever.
WWII is circumstantially unique- the vast majority of totalitarian land empires are not as bad as either Nazi germany or the Stalinist USSR. For that matter imperial Japan was a lot worse than a typical ethnonationalist imperial power, too. In the modern consciousness, including the consciousness of elite decision makers, everything about WWII is overshadowed by that fact(well, set of facts). And we are simply not very likely to have a war with three regimes that evil as active participants again on a timescale where people still remember WWII as a thing to draw lessons from and not as something Akin to the great Byzantine-Persian war or the war of Jenkin’s ear or King Phillip’s war. Sure, they’re historically relevant, but no one thinks about them to draw lessons.
‘Never again’ with regards to WWII refers to the litany of unprecedented and unrepeated human rights crises in the war, not to the existence of a war. And it was not obvious ahead of time that the Nazis or Soviets or imperial Japanese would murder so many people(although perhaps the nature of the regime should have been a clue that they would murder some number). Most continent-wide conventional wars between major powers do not involve the intentional killing of 10’s of millions of civilians. WWI featured a single genocide- the ottomans butchering Christian subject races- and a few smaller human rights abuses, the mass targeting of civilians was limited mostly to a single theater. The second Congo war and Vietnam both featured civilian deaths on a large scale, but no mass exterminations. The Iran-Iraq war was a war between some pretty detestable regimes- one of which carried out multiple active genocides during the war and the other of which conscripted children to use as human mine clearers- but doesn’t feature the gigantic relative civilian body counts that WWII did.
The closest parallels, morally, are the Yugoslav breakup and some conflicts in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the size doesn’t compare. And that’s the relevant reason WWII sticks in anyone’s mind. You can avoid another set of world spanning genocides by not putting genocidal madmen in charge of three major continental powers all at once, and that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon.
How many other totalitarian land empires are you counting as having existed (roughly)?
If there have been 50 other empires then sure these 2 are an outlier, but if China, the Central Powers (do they count as totalitarian?) and Tsarist Russia are the only other examples then it's at most a slim and in no way a vast majority.
Modern China and Saudi Arabia, Tsarist Russia, kruschevite Russia, fascist Romania, ceasescu’s Romania, Yugoslavia, Saddam’s Iraq, arguably Vietnam and North Korea, possibly modern Russia(I’m seeing a track record here), potentially apartheid SA and maybe Iran and hafez’s Syria. I’d also count Egypt at certain points in the late 20th century and mobutu’s Congo.
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I hope that's the case, but I'm not convinced that Tooze's Wages of Destruction is wrong.
It describes a lot of the worst atrocities by Nazi Germany in economic and logistic terms, and while that doesn't make the people who did it any less genocidally mad or evil -- the actions are just as vile whether done because of bad moral philosophy or to simplify food logistics -- it does give an alternative reason why three (or, uh, many more than that) genocidal madmen popped up and received widespread support all at once, despite their often wildly conflicting positions and backgrounds. And one can at least imagine the same frameworks applying to those other genocidal madmen, and to other less-successful ones who still nonetheless punched far above their grade.
Which still leaves revisionism as pretty unexciting, but does leave past genocides and especially the bigger and more deadly past genocides as worth studying.
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As a comment about the cocktail-party talk of Anglo-Jewish in elites early 21st century America, this is probably true, but as a statement about the global political response to World War II, it is profoundly false. The people who live through WW2 and the institutions they set up were all about "Never again" with regard to total war between the great powers.
The first test is how the Western allies handle Stalin's post-war demands, and given a choice between "Never again" as in don't commit/assist/cover up epic human rights abuses and "Never again" as in don't risk a war with Stalin over petty shit like human rights, the West chooses peace. The Cold War begins with conflicts over spheres of influence, not Soviet crimes. The rhetoric of the Truman doctrine is about defending democracy against totalitarianism, but the actual policy it was first used to justify was supporting what were effectively right-wing military governments in Greece and Turkey against probably-popular Communist-backed revolutions.
The Preamble to the UN Charter begins "We the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war..." and sets up a whole bunch of conflict-resolution institutions, some of which were intended to have teeth (although the Cold War meant that the Security Council never functioned as intended). It specifically declined to set up human-rights enforcement institutions - Article 2, Principle 7 is "Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state "
The Schuman Declaration setting up what would eventually become the European Coal and Steel Community specifically states that the aim is to make another war between France and (West) Germany impossible, but does not mention human rights. The EEC/EU doesn't even acquire a formal commitment to human rights until 2000.
This isn't surprising - World War II was an order of magnitude more deadly and destructive than the Holocaust. Comparing these Jewish Holocaust death tolls to these total WW2 death tolls, the only country where Holocausted Jews were a majority of the dead was Czechoslovakia (which was spared the worst of WW2 in a paradoxical but genuine success for Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy).
In Russia and China, "Never again" obviously refers to the invasion and ruination of their countries by Germany and Japan respectively - it is a call to make sure that you are at the table and not on the menu next time. So not "Never again a war", but "Never again a war without a quick victory". For obvious reasons, not about the Holocaust.
It is easy for Americans to think silly things about WW2 because the United States was spared most of the negative consequences. Continental Europe was basically trashed from Saint-Lo to Stalingrad, as was China. The UK was bombed, blockaded, and bankrupted. Japan was nuked. As the people who actually lived through all this die off, Americanised western Europeans are starting to think the same silly things. This is bad.
I don’t think the Russo-Chinese elites are reading WWII revisionism, and the 40’s and fifties elites definitely aren’t because they’re dead.
The decision makers in western countries don’t care how the war started, don’t think about the vast human cost that was inevitable from major conventional war between continental empires, and focus on 1) the unnecessary abuse of civilians and 2) why that was, which boils down to the ideological peculiarities of several of the regimes involved. That’s the lesson our elites are applying, and the actual reasons WWII broke out are irrelevant for it.
Yes, there’s arguments that an antisemitic regime starting to lose a total war will start exterminating the Jewish population, but Germany turning towards antisemitism was not inevitable prior to the Nazi party deciding to make antisemitism a major part of their platform. The Soviet regime was probably going to leave a gigantic body count no matter what happened, but, you know, the Russian empire could have been non communist.
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I mean while I’m sure that we did accidentally stop human rights abuses, the story of never again is really only propaganda. Nobody has or will go to war over human rights. It’s just that it’s something the West has generally found the idea useful as it sounds a bit better to say “human rights” and “fighting to end war” than “we’re strong and we are stronger economically so toe the line or else.” The real reasons were pragmatic and aimed at our own ends.
intervention in Serbia/Kosovo seems like a case of that, with side of "stop your stupid tensions in that region, last time it ignited WW II"
there were also some other interventions which seem to be genuinely attempt at that
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"Never again a Holocaust" is propaganda. "Never again a land war in Europe" is something that Europeans and Americans of the wartime generation took extremely seriously, and which Europeans and Blue Tribe Americans are still taking seriously in Ukraine as we speak.
Much as the globohomo elites liked to kvetch about the lack of Pride parades in Moscow, nobody seriously suggested actually doing anything about it, even something petty like boycotting the Sochi Winter Olympics. What brought the banhammer down - both the little banhammer in 2014 and the big banhammer in 2022 - was Russian troops crossing the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine with murderous intent.
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That's a false dichotomy.
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Serbia seems like it was a war from the west and mostly about human rights.
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Russia has been very much at the table in WW2, chomping on pieces of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Baltic states, etc. Is it when their former friends the Nazis turned out to be less than friendly, the trouble began. Russia and Germany were probably the two European parties that were ok with the war started - the rest remembered WWI and so were going out of their way to not provoke another one - which, paradoxically, ensured it would happen.
Agreed on the actual historical facts, but my impression is that the historical mythology of WW2 is extremely important to the versions of national identity being promoted by both the Soviet and the Putinist regimes. And the key points of the myth are:
The innocence of the Soviet Union and the utter wickedness of Hitler's unprovoked aggression (the Molotov-Ribentropp pact is ignored, obv), occasionally backed up with ahistorical claims that the Soviet Union was abandoned or betrayed by the western democracies in the pre-war period.
The Soviet Union's underdog status at the start of the war (probably true)
The extraordinary deadliness and destructiveness of the eastern front in WW2 (which is true) which is blamed on Nazi wickedness (ignoring the contribution of Soviet incompetence)
The extraordinary effort and sacrifice of the Soviet people to defeat the Nazis (definitely true)
The idea that defeating the Nazis was a mostly-Soviet achievement while the western Allies effectively sat the war out and watched Nazis and Communists shoot each other, Spanish Civil War style, and that the rest of the world being insufficiently grateful to the Soviet Union for singlehandedly saving the world from Nazism at enormous human cost is a sign of western wickedness. (Ahistorical)
In other words, the myth clearly centres aggression and not genocide as Hitler's supreme crime, and the intended lesson of the myth is that Russia is always at risk of a surprise attack from the west, needs to be stronk so that the attack can be repelled well before the "Nazis" get to Stalingrad, and suffered massively from being insufficiently stronk in 1941.
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Didn't it? I think the purpose of it was (as you explained...) to avoid a war between the great powers? It seems to me it succeeded quite well.
My understanding is that the purpose of the Security Council was to proactively deal with "threats to international peace and security" (like minor royals being shot in Sarajevo or less-than-perfectly controlled great power client states invading each other) before they escalated to possible great power conflict. I don't think it did this - in particular the list of US-Soviet proxy wars in banana republics is long, and the UN system did basically nothing - escalation was prevented by some combination of MAD and the post-Cuban Missile Crisis steps taken to ensure bilateral communication between the superpowers.
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