It's a funny thing, but everyone is perpetually re-fighting World War II.
One's enemies are always, it seems — via some bizarre, twisted illogic — Nazis.
And so that must put one in the right. Surely?
Starting in 1945, anyone who resisted Communism in the lands newly conquered ('liberated' was in some key respects a bit of a stretch) by the USSR stood to be denounced as a 'fascist'. And treated accordingly.
In Western countries during the Cold War, left-wingers — especially the young and irresponsible ones — learned from their mentors in Moscow, and routinely denounced Tories, Christian Democrats, and anyone else right of centre, as 'fascists'.
During the wars of Yugoslav break-up in the 1990s, all sides claimed they were re-fighting World War II. (With at least a modicum of reason: the intervening years of Communism had screened out all non-nonsensical discussion of 1941-45 — and so nothing had been resolved.) And nasty elements on all sides made a point of living down to the stereotypes projected onto them.
In 2010, when the fiscally feckless habits of the Greek population and the vastly corrupt public accounts of its government could be hidden no longer, with results that threatened the existence of the Euro itself, Germany offered to bail them out on condition of draconian reforms. The Greek government responded by claiming that Angela Merkel was a new Hitler, intent on imposing her will on poor little Greece.
The very name 'Antifa' tells its own story about what its members think they're doing — but the long-time habit of the American far left in imputing 'fascism' to almost anyone they don't like has in more recent years been replicated on the right, with (for example) the oleaginous Eric Metaxas denouncing the (admittedly highly unlikeable) presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 as 'Hitlary'. Other right-wingers have made equally bizarre and extremely offensive parallels between Covid vaccinations and the Holocaust.
Just last week, a particularly stupid British Labour MP was forced by her own party leadership to apologise after calling the current (again highly unsavoury) Israeli government 'fascist'.
And Putin, from the start of his unprovoked military invasion of a democracy with a Jewish president, has insisted that he is aiming to 'de-Nazify' Ukraine. Now, the provision, by an array of European democracies, of German-made tanks to Ukraine apparently proves it. Yesterday, his speech on the 80th anniversary of victory in the Battle of Stalingrad insisted that history was repeating itself: "It's unbelievable but true. We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks."
In a world with ever fewer points of agreement about morals, the fact that there is still broad agreement that the Nazis were a low point, and that massacring people on account of their religion or ethnicity is evil, makes Nazism and the Holocaust irresistible touchstones for those flailing about to put themselves, all appearances notwithstanding, in the right. And the more ignorant the speaker, on the one hand, or his or her presumed audience, on the other, the more irresistible do those touchstones appear as a way of demonising one's opponents.
The result, of course, is that they do nothing of the sort. Where the accusations carry even a tiny grain of truth (e.g., right-wing populist speechifying), the net result is to push the accused further down the path towards actual fascism. (If their 'reasonable' views or activities are castigated as 'fascist', maybe fascism isn't so awful after all, etc..) To that extent, the accusers are actively creating their own monsters. ... And insofar as such accusations contain no grain of truth but are just so much gas-baggery, they merely discredit those making them. (Oh, and insult the dead, and trivialise the enormity of the Holocaust.)
No appeasement!
All my life, the most frequent homily-from-history I have heard is that one must not appease aggressors and dictators. That their actions must be nipped in the bud — or else the price later on will be greater. This goes so far back into my childhood that I cannot even remember when I first heard it. Probably in primary school. Certainly from my father. And in newspapers and TV programmes aplenty, repeated with a knowing sagacity. Whatever you do, don't be a Neville Chamberlain!
It recurred later in life. The reason we had to reverse Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was because Saddam was like Hitler: if not stopped here, he would go on and on. Tony Blair made the same argument for intervention in Kosovo in 1999: Milošević was now Hitler — though it remained unclear how his actions (however despicable) in a province of his own country threatened European peace, or were a prelude to invasion of neighbours. Serbs responded, of course, by denouncing NATO as Nazis.
I leave aside the fact that, in the case of Hitler's Germany, the time to forswear appeasement and start re-arming was in 1933, when Germany was still weak — not at Munich in 1938. Chamberlain is unjustly derided as a gullible fool for the role he played there. For the derision overlooks two things. In the first place, the public and the press, in both Britain and America, cheered him to the echo as saving the world from war (so, if he was a fool, he was in wide company). In the second place, the combined might of Britain and France could not have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, regardless of what they did or did not consent to at Munich; their re-armament had barely started. If one doubts that, look at their impotence to help Poland even a year later. And even in 1940, Britain barely escaped invasion by the skin of its teeth (if I understand correctly, if the output of Spitfires and Hurricanes had been about four weeks behind what it actually was, it would all have been over) — and France did not escape at all. Looked at in that light, what Chamberlain was doing in Munich in 1938 was buying time.
But the one occasion that the lesson about appeasement was truly needed, facing an adversary who really could inflict mortal damage upon us, it was not heeded — all the endless iterations of the homily since 1945 notwithstanding. The invasion of a large chunk of Georgia in 2008; the seizure of Crimea and the partial invasion of the Donbas in 2014; the assassination of dissident Russians — including the use of nuclear materials — in Britain and elsewhere: all were met with nothing more than denunciations; token sanctions; and ritual diplomatic protests. The West's obsession with its own internal culture wars continued to rank far higher in its priorities than the defence of the ability to have such debates in the first place. Defence spending remained the poor cousin in Western treasuries: the post-Cold-War 'peace dividend' continued to be drawn upon to fund more frivolous projects.
And now — here we are.
The reason we cannot give Ukraine more tanks than we are doing is that too many of our own are in mothballs, or are awaiting years-overdue maintenance. The production capacity of our defence contractors could not withstand a sudden rush of orders.
We have fallen into precisely the trap we have been forever fulminating about. (In the same way, of course, our 'Never again!' about the Holocaust rings hollow after the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, about which the outside world did ... nothing.)
"The lesson of history is that we learn nothing from history"?
It is tempting, in view of all I have said here, to answer the mocking question with a reluctant 'yes'.
Yet it need not be so.
The 'lessons' of World War II have suffered grievously from being over-applied — and then not applied where they truly were necessary.
Though there certainly are Nazis in the world, they are almost always tiny groups, unable to threaten the stability of the countries where they are based. There are genuine fascists in Ukraine, for example — but they are not in parliament, nor in charge of anything. There are rather more in Russia.
Almost always, however, accusations of 'Nazism' and 'fascism' are tendentious at best. They reflect the malice or the ignorance (or both) of the accuser — and the hoped-for ignorance of the target audience. They are used to ramp up the level of moral combat over issues that are secondary, in the ever-diminishing hope that this will serve to rally support to one's cause. And all that happens is that public debate is further debased.
To actually learn something from history (and we'll stick, for simplicity's sake, with the examples discussed here), there is one thing we must not do — and one thing we must do.
We must not weaponise history — to use it as cheap advocacy and supposed 'proof' of the thing we already thought anyway, and the wrongness or evil of the people we have already decided to reject. Nothing is learned by that procedure except the fact of your own dishonesty.
And we must use history self-critically — as a way of highlighting and learning from our own weaknesses and frailties. The British, French, and Americans of the 1930s may have been foolish — but they were so in ways exactly like ourselves. They, too, wanted peace and prosperity — and they allowed their wishes to mislead them into thinking those things attainable without cost and inconvenience. Or perhaps, at the cost of others — Czechs; Georgians; Crimean Tatars....
Sobering and chastening, but excellent.