APRIL 27, 2023 – Finally, 650 pages and the comprehensive survey of the worst conflagration the world has ever known are behind me. I speak of Inferno, The World at War, 1939 – 1945 by Max Hastings. Few books have had such an impact on my psyche and my world view generally. I could easily fill 65 pages with a stream of consciousness bearing a more detailed summary of my reaction, but a highly abridged version is more appropriate for this post.
I’ve been thoroughly cured of the effects of a lifetime diet of WW II propaganda, much of it glorifying American participation. The war was not a struggle of “good” vs. “evil.” It was a Satanic orgy on a scale and of a nature as far beyond our capacity to imagine as it was within our capacity to produce. About the only thing that can be said with confidence about our involvement is that if America had not joined the war, the outcome for the world would have been worse.
The conflict produced Faustian bargains and unintended consequences that have shaped the world ever since. To defeat Hitler, we became allies with Stalin at the cost of Soviet control of Eastern Europe. Putin’s sordid enterprise in Ukraine is an extension of that legacy. The geopolitical price of the Holocaust and persistence of anti-Semitism is the chronic Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The cost of defeating Imperial Japan was Britain’s loss of its empire.
Sixty million people perished in the war, but 10s of millions more lost their homes, their livelihoods, and indeed, their souls. Physical destruction of buildings, housing stock, factories, schools, hospitals, cultural heritage, and agriculture was incalculable. A supreme wonder is that the world could ever recover from such annihilation . . .
. . . Or from such human savagery. As their fates became clear, German and Japanese combatants became ever more cruel and depraved, killing prisoners, raping and murdering civilians and scorching the earth in retreat. Likewise the victors, especially the Red Army, unleashed their wrath against everyone in their path, matching the worst of the worst of their German foes.
The war crime trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo brought relative few Axis perpetrators to justice. Controlled by the victors, the trials did nothing to address war crimes by the Red Army—other Allied combatants.
I feel psychologically scarred and in intellectual disbelief after having merely read this detailed, comprehensive history of WW II. How must the conflict have affected survivors who experienced the horrors firsthand?
To avoid descent into despair, my survival instinct compels me to focus on something positive: the world didn’t sink into permanent darkness. Somehow the planet continued turning in the sunlight. Civilization found its way again.
But it would be Pollyannaish to think the world can’t or won’t again sink to infernal depths. If by evolutionary impulsion we’re resilient, we haven’t yet evolved out of our pattern of self-extinctive behaviors. Irrational nihilism remains as strong as constructive rationalism. Moreover, in addition to being on guard against the forces that triggered WW II—fascism, nationalism, authoritarianism—we also need to worry about the destabilizing effects of climate change, game-changing AI, and deadly pandemics. We’re a resilient species, as every species needs to be to survive. WW II was the supreme test of our resilience, and miraculously, we passed after paying a heavy toll. But that’s no guarantee that we can avoid future tests of equal or greater challenge—or that we’ll have the resources to pay the toll and pass.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
