Intolerance: The 'heroes' of World War II

The 'heroes' of World War II

We are guilty of taking terms like 'Fascist' or 'Nazi' lightly. It is a criminal slander for many while it is merely a slur for few while some take it positively. Calling people fascists or nazis is validated by Left-leaning vocabularies, often while describing or deflating the Right-leaning. Society abounds with people proudly joking about Nazis and social media is flooded with racial hate amounting to fascism. The global political space is witnessing a rapid intellectual decline. Self-claimed self-righteous protestors are using Swastika as banners for the same reasons as Nazis – hate.

To understand fascism, we must look at World War II objectively because it has since been designated a tone-deaf 'good vs evil' war between the Allies and the Axis powers. The dramatic war makes it difficult to keep prejudices aside. Social theorists of the Frankfurt schools like Theodore Adorno muddied the event by prejudiced attempts to explain the war. In his book The Authoritarian Personality, Adorno deliberately drew false equivalences while describing resistance to democratic socialism and propagandist jingoism by Hollywood as fascism. Paul E. Gottfried, an American paleoconservative, asserts in his book Fascism: The Career of a Concept that the Frankfurt School (which Adorno was part of) was quick in deeming all inconveniences as fascist. Gottfried writes that Theodore Adorno, driven by his anti-fascist fear, used questionable means to derive traces between those who did not share his socialist sentiments and those who destroyed humans industrially. The fear was eventually made a circus by the media which created a paranoia that still leads many self-righteous people to condescendingly call other people fascists. Hitler died long ago but his spectre was deliberately kept alive by his own, the Socialists¹⁠.

The first official concentration camp came up at Dachau (1933) for Communists. Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews began to be stigmatized and persecuted. This culminated in Kristallnacht, or the 'night of broken glass' (1938) when synagogues were burned in riots. From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did. In 1939, Nazis selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program. The Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust. Throughout 1940, the German army conquered Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. A memorandum in 1941 referred to the need for an Endlösung (final solution) to 'the Jewish question'. Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow star, making them open targets²⁠.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at Auschwitz camp. The first mass gassings began at Belzec camp in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. In 1943, eugenicist Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous biological experiments. By spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power. Hitler committed suicide in April. Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

An Italian Jew author wrote, "The last trace of civilization had vanished. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.” By 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. Approximately 60 lakhs Jews and some 50 lakhs non-Jews died in the Holocaust, including 10 lakhs children.

In such a situation, is feigning blindness to the obvious bearable? World War II reshaped the world as we see it today. Let me clear some misconceptions about this war. World War II is not American history or German history or British history. It is not Jewish history, European history, Filipino history, Japanese history or even military history. It is human history and it put India in the position it is today.

The term 'fascism' is associated with the regimes that were headed by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The iconography of such regimes includes Uniformed Squadrismos (Italy) or Stormtroopers (Germany), mass processions, the subordination of independent media and legislature, economical reorganization, persecution of real or imagined enemies, detention camps, mass murders and mobilization nations ending in annihilation. Elie Wiesel, a Romanian born American Nobel laureate deemed Hitler the symbol of inhumanity. Today, all these symbols are seen in communist regimes as well. Today, fascism is rightly shunned and unacceptable while communism is made mainstream.

Hitler lost the war, yet in doing so he changed everything. If his impact were measured only in body counts, Hitler would lose to communist chairmen like Stalin and Mao. Fascism died the quickest death in the history of political ideas and Hitler was painted as the epitome of villainy but murderous leaders like Stalin and Mao were quick to project and hide behind the Nazi spectre to divert attention from the bodies they had buried under the Siberian Kolyma Highway and the Chinese Great Leap. We must remember at all times that these men came from a long line of mass-murderers stretching back to Genghis Khan, and they went about killing religiously.

The Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista were mostly pagan. The German Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei were Christian. The Russian Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya Partiya bol'shevikov found god in Stalin while, Mao Zedong, the founder of the Chinese Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng, declared himself god after cleansing China by blood. These were murderers who made killing an industry. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism shocked the Western world. German scientists were imported to America to work for their former enemies, the resulting technologies produced weapons of even bigger mass destructions.

War-torn societies believe that without violence there is no punishment, and without punishment, there is no sense of absolution or justice. Why else would they drop nuclear bombs on a near defeated Japan? The West, led by the USA in the ascendancy, knew in its bones how strong an emotion justice is. They knew how such massive injustices can fuel anarchy only ending in the eventual rise of faiths and new world orders so they wanted to keep the newly-won dominance to themselves, by terrifying the world with weapons of mass destruction.

In WWII alone, the Indian Army numbered over 25 lakhs³⁠ - the largest 'all-volunteer' force in human history. It saw action in theatres of North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and earned the distinction of liberating Italy, despite itself being a colonial army. It was fighting a foreign war on behalf of the very nation which enslaved it. It did not help Indian cause. United Nations is still controlled by WWII victors. A list of total countrywise WWII casualties is telling -

USSR - 2.7 crores (15% of total)

China - 2 crores (5%)

Germany - 70 lakhs (11%)

Poland - 60 lakhs (17%)

Dutch East Indies - 40 lakhs (?)

Japan - 30 lakhs (5%)

India - 22 lakhs (0.5%)

Italy - 5,14,000 (1.5%)

UK - 4,50,900 (1%)

USA - 4,19,400 (0.5%)

Turkey - 200 (?)

Switzerland - 100 (?)

The Swiss had made a business out of being a neutral ground. Turkey started out WWII with the Allies team, bound to Britain and France by the military alliance of 1939 before moving to non-belligerency in 1940 after the fall of France to suddenly switch to the Nazi team4, adopting a policy of ‘active neutrality’ in 1941 after the German occupation of the Balkans and the conclusion of a German-Turkish Treaty of Friendship in June of 1941. USSR was a Nazi collaborator till the morning of Operation Barbarossa, courtesy the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Soviet trains loaded with foodgrains, oils and Jews were steaming into German territories till the moment guns began booming on the Eastern front.

Nations are as contradictory as humans. The American immigration act prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family from reaching America. Germans noted how countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews while declining to admit them. On one hand, they refused to take in refugees, on the other hand, they welcomed useful Nazis. Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program built rockets for Nazis. When Braun was captured in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex. He engineered a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation stateside minus the Jew slave labour. Records were airbrushed, even de-Nazification procedures were bypassed in haste to accommodate him.

The modern world is simmering yet again. A new conflict is brewing on the horizon since the world wars. Nationalists are increasingly under fire, accused of using history to define boundaries and prototypes of nationhood, for creating foundational legends of nations and for narrowing definitions of nationhood in general. Internationalists are being blamed for the failure of globalisation. Until WWII, the most important aspect in narrating a foundational legend of nationhood involved homogeneity. This required undermining of heterogeneity and emphasis on commonalities, which in turn required long reigns thus helping leftists, liberals and conservatives alike. Today, Canadian Liberals are one of the most successful political monarchs in the world along with Kim family of North Korea and Nehru family of India. The Nehru family has directly ruled for forty-eight out of seventy-three free democratic years. Kim family is reviled while Nehru family is adored.

It was Socrates who first took a radical position over the concept of evil in the West. He argued that anyone who was acquainted with good could not intentionally choose evil. Western enlightenment thinkers went further, pushing concepts of good and evil into the realm of superstitions. Hitler changed that. Genghis Khan was a pillager, but Hitler had taste for high art and culture. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were and was boastful about it while Mao and Stalin took the pain of creating class enemies to satiate post-war resentment.

Western theologians and historians explicitly term Hitler as divine punishment for European Jews. They argue that only guilt on so massive a scale as the Shoah (Hebrew for the Holocaust) could fetch the promised land, arguing that Hitler made Israel possible. War victors took fallible humans and carved them to suit narrative purposes but the benevolent bluff got called out on the internet. In five centuries, we'll not look back for Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, or Gandhi, but we will remember the survival of the democratic spirit in the face of anti-democratic ideas.

One wonders why are Communists not as reviled as Hitler. It is because Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing and did not shroud the demonic act in the merciful garb of ‘social work’. Many politicians have escaped punishment because definitions of genocide don’t include nations killing social classes and political groups. Hitler, Stalin and Mao demanded a whole rethinking about good, evil, gods and man globally. Fortunately, India knew how villains operated in the grey, as they had known Ravan since time immemorial.

The West claims it was Churchill first, then Roosevelt (later on Reagan), who reawakened the West to its core values: freedom, civility, decency and strength⁵⁠. For generations, before the internet became accessible, people were led by static vernacular and will. What Western politicians had begun preaching was long known to the East. Hindus knew the concept of righteous wars justified by Dharma, Buddhist monks trained for it and the Sikh Gurus died fighting in them. Amidst the resurgent pride, India must not forget that no civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world, no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters. Keeping China in view, India can learn from the Japanese. After all, Japan found it’s way back to greatness despite countless massacres and two nuclear bombs. We must accept the uniqueness of our issues and think anew instead of parroting the West.

1. Hitler and the socialist dream | The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/hitler-and-the-socialist-dream-1186455.html.

2. The Holocaust - Facts, Victims & Survivors - HISTORY. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/the-holocaust.

3. A Largely Indian Victory in World War II, Mostly Forgotten in India - The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/world/asia/a-largely-indian-victory-in-world-war-ii-mostly-forgotten-in-india.html.

4. WWII Lesson for Trump: Turkey Was in Bed With the Nazis. https://www.thedailybeast.com/wwii-lesson-for-trump-turkey-was-in-bed-with-the-nazis.

5. BBC - History - World Wars: Secrets of Leadership: Hitler and Churchill. https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/hitler_churchill_01.shtml.