Remembering V-E Day

From Arthur Herman on NRO:


Despite the horrors of the Holocaust, Germany's defeat could hardly be called a victory for justice or humanity. After all, it left Hitler's brutal collaborator, Josef Stalin, in control of eastern Europe. Russian soldiers liberated Auschwitz on April 27, yet the camp was only a clone of Stalin's own gulag. In a few months, Soviet judges would be sitting solemnly at the Nurnberg trials trying German defendants for using slave labor — as odious a twist of irony as history has ever delivered.

So this was not a victory for justice. It was, however, a crucial victory for liberal democracy, the very system that had seemed to be on the brink of destruction four years earlier. It was that system that Hitler and others had blamed for plunging the world into the Great Depression, and which he promised to crush by defeating the liberal democracies and their "Jewish capitalist warmonger" allies. To Hitler, Britain and America represented a way of life that was decadent, corrupt, and grossly self-serving — precisely the same complaints voiced by Osama bin Laden and today's Islamic terrorists. And it was a way of life that in the fall of 1940 seemed about to pass into history.

It is important to remember how many people, especially Europeans, wanted democracy to lose and hoped Hitler would win. They included the world's Communist parties, who followed the directions of their leader Josef Stalin in enthusiastically embracing his alliance with Nazi Germany. They included politicians and intellectuals who, after Hitler's lightning victories in Poland and France, saw a new world order arising and wanted to be part of it. Denmark's elected government enthused in July 1940 that Hitler had "brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in an economic and political sense..." France's Robert Brasillach saw Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin as the men of the future and Roosevelt and Churchill as "grotesquely antiquated" relics of the past. Catholic mystagogue Teilhard de Chardin proclaimed that "we are watching the birth, more than the death, of a World....the Germans deserve to win..." Holland's Paul de Man, later the darling of the deconstructionist Left at Yale and other universities, announced that Europe's future under Nazi rule was brighter than ever and that "we are entering a mystical era, a period of faith and belief, with all that this entails," with the Third Reich at its center.


Anyone want to argue against a pre-emptive strike on Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin? Or at least standing up to them from the very first?

Do we have to wait for a worldwide war to begin before we take action?

One last thing. Sometimes, some people just have to be killed.