- Jean-Pierre Page
WESTERN EUROPEAN VIEWS on the Second World War and the painful past have evolved significantly. Today its interpretation is at the heart of national and international political contentions. The Conservative Revolution of the 1980s saw a depoliticisation of history, reversing the post-war trend to understand history from the perspective of the dominated, notably under the impetus of social and political struggles and the decolonisation movement. Today, history has become the domain of the media, cultural industry and public authorities, and the analysis propagated is not restricted to a shared concern for independent and non-partisan historical research, but instrumentalised to legitimise neoliberalism and US hegemony as the sole horizon of history, the only alternative.
However, the world is changing, and changing fast. It is not Francis Fukuyama’s end of history. The international balance of power has altered dramatically, and the contradictions have become more acute. The end of the Second World War and the defeat of fascism ushered in a new period of history. Anti-fascism gave way to anti-Communism. The Cold War that followed, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the disappearance of the Soviet Union were decisive events that had political, economic, and military consequences, particularly for Europe. The abolition of existing borders and Western aggrandisement with NATO expansion raised crucial issues related to collective security, state sovereignty and high-risk conflicts.
The global context is marked by a US-led unipolar world order facing a systemic crisis, including one posing an existential threat to European institutions. As we see from the war in Ukraine, sovereignty is the main obstacle to the preservation of the established order. The West and the political and economic model that it represents is in decline, highlighted by the revival of Russia, the undeniable rise of China on the world stage, and the emergence of anti-hegemonic alliances. Western bids to counter this decline at whatever cost, preserve US hegemony, and give legitimacy to its actions are at the origin of the political and ideological efforts to impose a different understanding and interpretation of history, resulting in its manipulation and the propagation of fables and untruths .
This re-writing of history has to do with Washington’s agenda to impose on the rest of the world a new system of ‘global governance,’ a nebulous ‘rules-based order,’ founded on US supremacy and unilateralism. Rooted in the ideology of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, it denigrates alternative cultures as inferior and unworthy, dividing the world into superior and inferior, civilized and uncivilized, liberal and illiberal, good and bad. It has now been conceptualised in terms of ‘democracy versus autocracy’ and wielded as a weapon in Washington’s bloc politics and bloc confrontation, subverting the UN Charter-based multilateral system founded on respect for the sovereign equality of States and the right of peoples to self-determination.
And it is toward this end that all the world’s media, so-called experts, complacent academics, NGOs, and think-tanks that the United States can rely upon are being mobilized. In unison, they rattle off the same argument: “Russia is at our doorstep implementing a Machiavellian plan to dominate Europe, the earth, and also the stars!” Why not the entire universe, one may ask ? For the cause, China is thrown in, identified with Russia, and the emphasis is made how complementary their strategies are. Under threat of being accused of complicity with Vladimir Putin, any challenge to this new doxa is prohibited !
Recently a US media outlet proclaimed that it had been US troops that liberated Auschwitz, before retracting and apologizing for the error. In one of its first surveys, France’s oldest polling institute, IFOP, posed the following question at the end of the Second World War, repeating it 70 years later: “Which nation do you think contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945? Great Britain, the United States, or the USSR?” At the end of the War, over 60% of French responded it was Russia. Only 20% said it was the United States, and 12% the United Kingdom. Seventy years later, in a reversal of opinion, 58% believed it was the United States that had played the main role in Germany’s defeat.
It is to serve this hegemonic project that, in 1986, the gigantic Caen Memorial Museum in France was created with substantial US funding, as part of the International Network of Museums for Peace. It was dedicated to the history of the 20th century and to peace and given a special role to rewrite history. It contains gross historical errors. In 2002, several exhibition halls were added, devoted to the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Holocaust, highlighting only the role of the United States in the Normandy Landing as late as 6 June 1944.No mention is made of the head of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin as having officially first raised the question of opening a second front three years earlier, on 18 July 1941.
In the same spirit, in September 2019, the European Parliament voted a resolution stigmatising Nazism and Communism alike, claiming that the second world war had been triggered by the German-Soviet Pact: “… 80 years ago on 23 August 1939, the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact … which paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War”.
By reducing the origins of the Second World War to the “German-Soviet Pact,” the resolution places both Nazi Germany and the USSR on equal footing, considering both responsible, despite no serious historian, with a few rare exceptions, ever having questioned the aggressors as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan. By supporting the text, the European parliamentarians disavow the conclusions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, equating those who built the Auschwitz extermination camp with the Red Army that liberated the survivors.
Was it not the Nobel laureate for literature, Thomas Mann, who once wrote: “To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism.”?
The European Parliament has thus conferred legitimacy on a vision of history that has to do with pure propaganda, one that is silent on the policy of appeasement and the complicity of the ruling classes of most Western countries with Hitler’s Germany. Hence, its failure to mention the Munich Agreement, the Anschluss, or the period of collaboration between, for instance, Nazi Germany and Pétain’s France and the latter’s zealous roundups of Jews. The Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris on16 and 17 July 1942 was the ordeal of 13,000 men, women, old people and children deported to the gas chambers of the extermination camps, including Auschwitz. They were among the 75,000 Jews in France who suffered the same fate.
A tragic history that demands decency and humility has today given rise to a dishonest amalgam between the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, the events of October 7, Gaza and the Palestinian struggle. It is as if, in a distorted logic, Palestinians are at the root of a resurgence of anti-Semitism associated with the Nazis and Auschwitz. Establishing such a link with a struggle of a people for self-determination and decolonization is intolerable and unacceptable. It must not be forgotten that the establishment of the Jewish state on Palestinian land is the result of a link made by Western powers between Palestine and the problem of Jewish refugees in Europe, victims not of Arab, but of European anti-Semitism, with its ultimate expression in Nazi extermination camps.
The hypocritical rhetoric accompanying the exercise of re-writing history ironically disqualifies the very liberal order that its authors seek to preserve. “Make America great again,” “rebirth of the Germanic spirit,” or “civilizing mission of colonization,” which some Western politicians claim as their right, only serve as diversion from their own culpability for plunder, slavery, devastation, predation, and genocide.
The European Parliament’s resolution actively participates in the erasure of all traces of history. It legitimises the renaming of streets, the nostalgic neo-Nazi demonstrations, and the destruction of historical monuments celebrating the Red Army’s contribution to the victory over fascism, as in the Baltic states or in Ukraine. And all the while, it disregards the heroic patriotic and partisan struggles in all of Europe.
On 17 January 2024, the European Parliament engaged in yet another exercise on the past, adopting a new resolution that no longer contents itself with a call to rewrite history, but a call to erase all traces and create “a new shared culture of remembrance”. Member States are, for instance, called upon to update their existing curricula and teaching methods so that European history takes precedence over national history in order, we are told, to challenge the stereotypes and “sacred cows” of national histories.
It is hardly surprising that critical thinking is being replaced by slogans and emotional narratives, simplifying facts and impoverishing public debate. Society is being restricted in its ability to analyse its own past, its complexities and contradictions with all their nuances. The rise of revisionist narratives and “alternative truths” bears witness to the devaluation of rigorous historical analysis, eroding the legitimacy of academic, scientific and educational institutions, weakening them and compromising their essential role as guardians of history.
This simplification and instrumentalisation of history has devastating effects as once unifying symbols become subjects of discord. We are warned of the dangers ahead and alerted to our responsibility toward the younger and future generations to lead this struggle for History with a capital ‘H’.
[ This article was originally published by the Valdai Discussion Club under the title ‘How Europe Is Rewriting WWII History.’ COGGS is republishing it with an edited title. The author, Jean-Pierre Page, is a French writer and trade union activist.]
