Somewhat of a delicate matter as nobody wants to be seen as possibly downplaying how bad Nazis were. But I’m curious about the idea that the US played up WWII as a way to re-write history in a more beneficial way.
The general idea is that America and the UK re-framed the event around their heroism and making it about fighting tyranny. This was mainly to cover up the contributions of Communists and social democratic countries. To make it about tyranny covers up the material reasons for why the UK and the US opposed Hitler. Basically the industrial capitalists of the UK and the US needed to crush German industrialism. Then there is the matter of the holocaust. There was a tremendous focus on the holocaust to make it seem like the Allies (minus USSR of course because they actually would care) had a moral crusade. This is in spite of the documented antisemitic nature of the US (idk about the UK but would assume so) prior to WWII. Speaking of antisemitism, there would also be a re-framing of the holocaust to focus on Jewish ethnicity rather than all of the victims. Famously the poem “First they came for the communists…” was edited in the public memory. It plays into Zionism, which was rising before WWII. The UK playing a heavy role in helping Zionists take over Palestine.
I was reading some posts on r/TrueAnon about how Jewish people in the 60s and 70s (in the US) had no idea about the holocaust. It wasn’t something heavily emphasized even among popular historians of the time. There were some books they mentioned but I forgot to jot them down. I think Finklestein has talked about t his idea as well, including some of his own experiences. So the US would go on to place heavy emphasis on the holocaust and Jewish persecution in the 70s as part of a broader project on Zionism.
Then in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of pop culture about WWII. Adam Curtis touches on this but I don’t really regard him as a totally reliable source.
I’m curious about all this because it seems to be the only piece of history anyone can relate with modern politics. When I learn about the US before WWII it seems like Nazis weren’t exactly unique in their beliefs or cruelty. It used to be fairly common knowledge that the Nazis got a lot of inspiration from the US and UK. Concentration camps weren’t new. Eugenics wasn’t unique to Wiemar Germany. Industrial War had already occurred in WWI. Now I don’t know about industrialized genocide, maybe that was unique, but US companies helped with that too.
I guess when it comes down to it, when we call people Nazis, I just see gilded age Americans. I think that even right wingers think they’re Nazis only because the culture has been so refocused on that, even they don’t know right wing history beyond it. All they really know is that Hitler was racist to the point of genocide and makes everyone they don’t like mad.
Are there any books or anything on this? Am I getting a lot of stuff confused/wrong?
No book recommendations but it definitely seems a focal point of historical revisionism for the west.
Basically going into and before the war the west had a real image problem. Colonialism, racism, the brutal excesses of industrial capitalism that led to the election of reformers like FDR. So they wanted to gloss themselves as these great people, to create this sense of unity, of a new west from the ashes. And after the war of course they had the interest of fighting communism so they had a desire to paint themselves as victors and the main forces in a major heroic war on the side of good. I mean it was probably the only time in modern history that the west as a whole had been on the right side of something like this even if for cynical reasons (wishing to pit Nazi Germany and USSR against each other, have them destroy each other then come in and pick up the pieces as profit).
So there was strong incentive and among the working class there was a genuine sense that people had pulled together and worked together during the war and that their troops were heroes so that was not a hard sell.
So I agree with the premise. The US and the capitalist west as a whole basically cast all their sins onto Nazi Germany and through the magic of their participation in the war (of which the US’s interest in Europe was preventing the USSR from taking all of western Europe and turning it communist) were able to wash themselves clean of their own sins and come out the other side in the aftermath in the late 50s shining as these heroic good guys who’d fought for freedom and against this ultimate evil (Nazis). For this to work Nazi guilt and evil had to be focused on, taught, played up, etc.
We talk of end of goldfish memories and history starting after x date but in terms of US/western foreign policy there was a massive propaganda effort to do just that, to forget anything before WW2 and lionize instead the actions of the west (overplayed beyond what they were) instead as casting them as heroes. And they could do this somewhat as the US as part of its push to dismantle European power and cement itself as a new capitalist hegemon forced European countries to water down control of and in some cases divest themselves of colonies to again appear to be reformed and on the side of goodness.
So it’s a huge point of myth-making. Not only are Nazis seen as racists who people get mad at, they were by necessity elevated to this great, intimidating, strong, intelligent power for the purposes of portraying the US/western defeat of them in this myth-making as all the better, more hard-won, more impressive. So reactionaries see these cultural depictions of clean, strong, cunning, formidable and usually honorable (clean wermacht myth) enemies and I think the desire there is the same that drives an embrace of the confederacy. Only it’s more tempered in the case of Nazis because ALL of the cultural programming for half a century screamed how bad they were and because for a long time your old man or some tough dudes would beat the shit out of you for stanning Nazis because everyone knew they were the bad guys, America had been the good guys and why were you standing with the bad guys instead of America. And also of course because Nazis were foreigners. They were Germans.
There’s a few bits regarding the way the WWII narrative is portrayed that feed into what you’re talking about. The biggie, of course, being the downplaying of the Soviets’ role in defeating the Nazis, and the misrepresentation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, as to obfuscate the bourgeois interests of the Nazi state.
The other two things, not as blatant but still hugely important, relate to revisionism of Jewish peoples during WWII. There’s this portrayal of America as being motivated to fight the Nazis because of their oppression of Jews. Obviously, it was known that Hitler was antisemitic, and I’m sure that spurred some Jewish Americans to support the war. But the full extent of the Shoah wasn’t known to Western civilians, and even a lot of the leadership, until after the war. So there’s this anachronism where the US is motivated to fight by something they weren’t fully aware of until after the war. There’s a wartime propaganda short from Disney called Der Fuehrer’s Face, and the short depicts the evils of Nazi Germany as, food shortages, suppression of dissent, overworked laborers, and a lack of paid vacation. No mention of Jews (one cw if anyone is curious to watch it: massively racist caricatures of Japanese, Germans, and Italians).
The suppressed yin to that revisionist yang is that, not only were large swaths of Americans openly antisemitic back then, but prior to Peatl Harbor there was a substantial, explicit support for Hitler. There were rallies with thousands of people in major American cities for the Nazi party, many members of the bourgeoisie liked Hitler’s policies, there was that business leader plot to coup FDR. But the common narrative reduces this all down to “there was opposition to entering the war out of pure isolationism” as to avoid acknowledging the ideological overlaps between the Nazis and the hegemonic white ethnostate conventional wisdom of America.
Are there any books or anything on this?
Leaving World War II Behind, by David Swanson.
