On Richard Drayton's Article

This story is printed at the following web address:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1480252,00.html

I sent the story out to friends and a friend of Montreal Maurice responded (the response was forwarded to me) and I composed the following message to Maurice- a sort of further take on Draytong with, as he put it, "my colourful leaps in language." Taking his words of appreciation to heart, since I am generally bereft of creativity and rarely close to writing well, I figure I might as well plaster it on the old blog....

my ditty:


I sent the article out because is the perfect riposte to the us-them dichotomy, the favourite of people who need/want simplicity. This view (retrospective judgement of allied actions) is perfect to attack such thinking because since WW2 all the teams seem to have been mixed up. The bad guys have become the good guys. Gerhard Shroeder attends celebrations of D-Day in Normandy and the massive Soviet defeat of the Nazis in Moscow. Suddenly people have to take him and Grass seriously when they speak of Dresden. In Japan, there was the fire-bombing of Tokyo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki- a cumulative destruction of 600,000 lives, 1/10th of the holocaust. But, the Japanese are the good guys and the Chinese are the bad guys now. Junichiro Koizumi is thus in attendance in Moscow and that is another reason one is forced to pay heed to Japanese view on Allied wartime atrocities.

What I'm trying to point out is not that all is beauty and light since the teams haev changed and we are so lucky to have learnt all this now. On the contrary, the strange way in which politics have changed post-WW2 brings to light that idiotic simplistic notions of us/them good/bad dichotomies don't work and that this is bad for the simpletons.

The Soviets, Japanese and Germans are bad and we (i.e. anglo-americans) are good. But, the Soviets are good for defeating the Germans but bad for taking the Kurile Islands from Japan at the end of WW2. The Japanese and Germans are bad for everything. So that's settled at one level but it sounds kinda wonky and over-simplistic.

It would work if the Japanese and Germans and Soviets disappeared leaving us feeling good. But, unfortunately, with us here on the podium at Red Square are Gerhard, Vladimir and Junichiro, who are non-Soviet, non-Nazi, and non-Japanese militaristic (kinda). So we get into German v. Nazi, and Japanese v. bad-Japanese, and Russian v. Soviet. Each part of each dichotomy helps us explain the other ones. So russians are good because they opposed Nazis. Japanese are good because they opposed Soviets. And of course in East Germany, Germans are good because they opposed Soviets and the new Bad-Germans, i.e the Communists.

The real problem shows up when you try to relate the good guys in those equations to the allies. How do Russians, Good-Japanese, and Good-Germans relate to the Allies? Since Russia was broadly aligned with the the English in WW2 as opposed to WW1 (which would bring up problems) it's fixable. But what about the other two? In the case of Dresden, we are talking (ostensibly) about civilian German refugees, women and children and how 25-45k of them were bombed away in one night on the order of a British General, Arthur "Bomber" Harris (a man who, like Saddam, is honoured through statues, in his case in central london). In the case of the fire-bombing of Tokyo, and the nuclear holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, until the late seventies, there was no problem because there was no difference between Good-Japanese and Bad-Japanese- they were all still the yellow menace and "Made in Japan" was still a joke. Ah, but now, Junichiro and Co. are rich allies in the fight against another yellow menace, the North Koreans and the Chinese. So, the good/bad dichotomy surfaces and remains problematic. Suddenly, somebody's got to carry the can for 500,000 to 600,000 Good-Japanese civilians killed by nuclear strike and about a 100,000 killed by fire-bombing. After all, good Junichiro's mom must have been Good-Japanese, right? (see, if the good-bad Japanese dichotomy doesn't stand, then all of us, on the pure snow-white allied side are potential mass murderers, rapists etc... this is powder-keg stuff).

I read a novel a couple of years ago by a british writer who fought in the war, with a young italian man as the protagonist- the entire novel was comedic but one of the scenes deals with how some odd "liberator" from one of the allied armies came along a-liberating and raped his wife one day. Of course, the novel ends happily [in the terms of the 50s when it was written] with the protagonist accepting equally his child and child of the rapist and the larger now more multi-cultural family living happily ever after in Sunny Italy. The whole thing was poignant because rape was being dealt with like any other hazard of war that swam along in the funny story about a young man who wouldn't fight. Of course the novel was based on various things the the writer had seen in the war. It's weird- when I was younger, I read Commando and Battle comics. Now that I'm nearly done with my twenties, I find it incredible that the story pitched (and swallowed by) adults in the anglo-american sphere is of the same complexity- a candy-ass, snow-white and cinderella-like notion of Allies v. Axis.

People will empirically question the 10,000 rapes figure cited in the Aricle because it is the easiest thing to attack. They quickly turn their eyes away from the clear documentation of the other atrocities. That's when the ethical blank-cheque starts- and you're completely right, the article isn't a quibble about details- it's about how those details are being used. Korea, Vietnam, and then every other other damn war is/was defined in terms of snow-white World War 2.

History is ghastly, complex and uncertain- we can't let it be used by spin-doctors with simple answers to prolong the madness.