World War II: Not a Moral Triumph
I’ve started reading through some of the works of Mencius Moldbug. I figure that politics is a waste of cognition but, hey, it’s entertaining and I enjoy being exposed to different points of view. Moldbug is a bit long-winded (understatement), but the guys at More Right have put together PDF copies of the “essential Moldbug,” which makes reading it a whole hell of a lot easier.
I guess I better set this up. Mencius has been churning out millions of words criticizing progressivism, a movement which is perhaps best exemplified by the drivel that gets thousands of upvotes on Reddit. It’s the sort of political ideals embodied by academia and all those who describe themselves — without a hint of self-loathing — as an intellectual.
Anyways, I’ve been reading through Moldbug, and was struck by a passage where he points out an important piece of unquestioned and no doubt revisionist history: World War II was a struggle of good versus evil and good won. The popular narrative goes something like, “Hitler was an evil man, committing gross human rights violations by rounding up and slaughtering Jews. The Allied powers wouldn’t stand for this, so we put a stop to it.”
But this ignores:
- Stalin was on our side, and “it was Stalin, not Hitler, who initiated the first ethnic killing campaigns in interwar Europe.”
- Stalin killed a comparable number of people to Hitler, but it’s much more socially acceptable to be a Communist than a Nazi.
- Roosevelt maintained a “policy of cooperation” with Stalin. How would you feel if the United States had maintained a policy of cooperation with Hitler while he was exterminating the Jews? Would that have been a moral triumph?
- The New York Times, the most popular newspaper during the war, systematically buried stories about German atrocities against Jews.
Makes you wonder about this whole moral progress thing.