Arianna Huffington’s new celebrity group blog was launched yesterday, and there is a post by the neocon journalist (and Bush worshiper) David Frum that I actually agree with – and not just because he plugs Anne Applebaum’s book:
Imagine if a German chancellor were to describe the fall of the
Third Reich as a “catastrophe”! Yet that’s just what Putin termed the
collapse of the Soviet Union in his address to the Russian nation last
week: “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”The crimes of Nazi Germany are remembered and memorialized. Indeed
if anything there is a danger of over-remembrance: as if the Germany
that was vanquished six decades ago this week were more alive in our
mind than the democratic Germany that exists today. But who is
memorializing the crimes that were planned in the building that
overlooks that Red Square where today’s ceremonies take place? There
are some excellent books on the subject in the languages of the West –
Anne Applebaum’s superb Gulag
won a much deserved Pulitzer Prize last year – and the independent
states of central Europe have their own individual memorials.But where is the Russian equivalent to the memorial to the
murdered Jews built in Berlin? Americans spent hundreds of billions of
dollars to contain and defeat Soviet communism – yet where is the
American equivalent to the Holocaust museum to recall to mind the
Soviet crimes that explained and justified America’s sacrifices? And
where – a special question to the audience for this blog – are the
movies that tell new generations the story that Vladimir Putin wishes
to consign to silence and forgetfulness?
Frum is correct here; we must resist the putinization of history. But let’s not stop with Russia; America needs to examine its own myths of the Good War. Let’s look with a cold, objective eye at using the atom bomb against the civilians in Japan and the policy of firebombing German cities to maximize the terror against noncombatent citizens. The English journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft touches on this in a nice piece in the Boston Globe:
For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways,
particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany
to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000
British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians
killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were
numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not
now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women
and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February
1945.
Only when America comes to terms with its own myths can it perhaps avoid future wars that in the end will only destroy it from within.
