It says here in this history book that luckily the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?

— Norm MacDonald

Conservative thinkers and talkers, and some who happen to be both of those things, have in the last couple of years or so adopted a new whipping boy whose manifest affinity for receiving the business end of the rhetorical bludgeon has made him a quick favorite. That whipping boy is known in trending parlance as “the World War II Myth,” and he deserves much, though not quite all, of the ire that stripes his back. He is guilty of a great many sins for which conservatives hope to atone, and the nature of those sins is the very barrier which generally excludes liberals from jumping in on the beating.

Two primary characteristics of the myth are noteworthy for their problematic nature: the myth crystalizes the narrative of liberal utopian triumph and, in conjunction, assumes the validity of ideology as the primary category shaping history. Utopianism is admittedly a weakness of both these facets. It is no wonder the present conservative moment has dogpiled  this issue. As a new, counter-cultural, post-liberal consensus crawls from the primordial muck of the current conservative political-cultural coalition, acidically coalescing around the codified liberal standard seems a natural consequence. Acceptance of a post-liberal narrative will be a necessary next step, but rejection of the opposing narrative suffices in the climate of the so-called novus ordo seclorum.

A fundamental weakness in how the WWII myth re-characterizes the history preceding its events is in its peculiarly modern sense of what animates the great movements of history. A thesis of the American Revolution, and thus the American identity, which has been played out, observed and tested upon the stages of the French Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II in particular is the sense that war is most basically predicated on ideas. The American colonies fought for freedom, “self-evident truths” and “Common Sense,” the Jacobins for “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the Union for “the proposition that all men are created equal,” the Third Reich for everything contrary to liberalism, and so on. In each case, the American social imaginary frames these wars as ultimately caused by, formed around, and directed toward ideological ends.

It is uncommon for WWI to be discussed at all in America because it does not fit the framework neatly. Confederate flags and Nazi swastikas alike, despite their gross differences, inspire similarly vehement emotions today because of the common heuristic employed in parsing their historical elements into a narrative stream. But WWI was so very clearly not a war founded on ideals or ideas, it features no cults of personality or silver-tongued idealogues selling utopia. In fact, the Bolshevik Revolution is notable for its removal of Russia from the wider conflict. WWI is manifestly a political war, fought over oscillations in continental power sparked by a single assassination whose motivation remains arcane and decidedly non-universal. 

And yet, the same elements present in the causes of the Second World War are largely omitted in the common telling. The United States is not popularly imagined to have gone to war against Germany because of old wounds or the entanglements of global alliances inflamed by Japanese incursion, but rather the story is framed as a crusade of enlightened liberals against a regressive, bigoted tyrant. The political elements are often overlooked in favor of presenting the conflict as primarily between the ambassadors of worldviews, soldiers and armies being puppeted by systems of ideas. 

Notably, this contributes to mythologizing the story by universalizing it. Nazis didn’t and don’t have to be German, it’s of no consequence that fascism arose in Italy of all places. The conflict of WWII is imagined to have interchangeable participants. It is one manifestation of a cosmic battle that can and does take place on grand and minute scales all throughout history, the archetypalized battle of liberal good versus barbaric evil. WW2 becomes the arena, distinct from its players.

Fundamentally, this version of the myth fails because it misrepresents humanity. It fashionably imputes modern distinctives to the universal spirit of Man and sketches history as the trajectory of ideas, the battleground of ideologies. All of time is painted with a liberal palette as the competition of philosophies in the race to utopia. These techniques erase the particularity of history, smothering the underlying material shapes and vectors of cultures and places with broad strokes of universality.

People think what they do because of who they are. People think in the language they are born in. Peoples are shaped by where they are shaped. To put it most basically, even absurdly, things are made of stuff. Particular objects have discrete substance. The materials of the ground are absorbed into the tree, and thereby the tree becomes its environment. It’s growth, its shape, its very chemical composition are determined by its location. All life conforms to this pattern, including the growth of societies. Agriculture was developed according to the availability of waterways, and the characteristics of waterways are shaped by their respective surroundings. Culture itself is the result of this cultivation, it is by definition that which grows according to its placement in the earth.

The rationalism of the Enlightenment, the symptoms of which the West continues to suffer, would have man rise above his environment, foregoing perspective, bias, and individuality, ascending on wings of pure reason to the clear and objective vantage of Heaven. But even this idea is a product of the time and place in which it developed. Cultures may indeed be shaped by ideas, but ideas themselves are first created by cultures. They cannot be planted anywhere interchangeably, as the West’s continual forays into liberalizing the Middle East ought to demonstrate, any more than a given vegetable can take to any climate or soil. Not just anyone can come up with any idea. As Mark Gregory Pegg saliently notes, it is a fallacy of modernism to treat ideas as globally inevitable.

To be sure, history is even more deterministic than that. Ideas are only inevitable in the sense that the peculiar people who generate them can be the only ones to do so. Events necessarily progress as they do. If they could truly be any other way, they would. But things are never any other way than they are. Like the woman said, que sera, sera. Perhaps abstractly something like Nazism could have popped into existence with no context, no development, no prelude in any given corner of the inhabited world, but it didn’t. Nazism isn’t a mere abstraction, it was a movement and moment in real time. It could not have been other than what it was in some other time or place.

The cult of personality phenomenon so pronounced in WWII ought to demonstrate this. Consider the antedating example of Napoleon, who undoubtedly waged war on pretenses of ideology, of spreading liberal revolutionary ideals across the world. In actual fact, not just anyone could do what Napoleon did. The coalitions assembled to oppose the French Empire were the reaction of particular groups to the specific actions of a singular man. The light of liberalism did not simply shine in the minds of all Europe and pave the way for a generic, scientific empire with square, calculated ten-day weeks and conquer the globe by its rational merits. Nor were the forces of liberalism bested with superior counterarguments. The idea marched on the backs of certain men, men who had homes and families and stories, loves and hates, moods and needs. Liberalism in Napoleonic Europe lived and died by the muzzles of cannons at least as much as the mouths of orators. If the pen is mightier, it certainly doesn’t get very far without the sword’s approval. What is an idea, at any rate, without a person to exist in?

An important theme of Tolstoy’s depiction of war in Hadji Murat is the personal nature of the political. Tolstoy understood that politics is not primarily enspirited by disembodied ideas, but rather embodied in the action of men moved by whims. The title character does not defect to the Russian Empire for reasons of conscience or rational purity, but because he has a vendetta and a desire to rescue his family. The emperor decides on the matter of Murat’s defection largely based on how the menial events of the day had affected his disposition. Though it is easy as a modern person to identify “political” with “ideological,” Tolstoy understood the ancient reality that politics is always personal, that collectives are essentially always moved by individuals, and that individuals are moved profoundly by circumstance.

As is so often the case, the issue was summatively condensed in a classic Simpsons gag. Apu is asked as part of his U.S. citizenship test to name the cause of the American Civil War, at which point his nuanced soliloquy on the political, material, social and economic rifts between the North and South is interrupted with an admonition to, “Just say slavery.” History is a vast and untamable quarry, and in order to navigate the world, we need stories to condense histories in a manner that cuts immediately to their value and meaning. But human stories are just that, and therefore prone to imperfection and incorrectness. 

The players of the story of human history are not ideas, they’re humans. And human beings are not generally “good guys” fighting for all the right things or “bad guys” about whom it is impossible to find a redeeming quality. They’re just people, lowly sinners all. It’s telling of our cultural moment that one can hardly say these things without being suspected of sympathy for those wrong ideas the bad guys fought for. The only way to win the game of the WWII myth is not to play. The best way to tell that story is as the failure of ideology, the hopelessness of human genius, as the story of how human evolution is toward more widespread and exaggerated depravity rather than utopia. It’s a war between leaders who hoped ideas could save us, and were proven wrong by the death toll.

All that is to say that people don’t usually fight wars for ideas. That is a novel imposition of the Enlightenment, portended in the Wars of Religion. Ultimately, the universal characteristic of all wars is that we fight wars because we’re human. No idea can save us from that, at which fact the utopians stop up their ears and rend their cloaks. It is sheer folly to see the sweep of history as up from ignorance and toward the peaceful bliss of the coming ubiquity of right-think, whatever it looks like. The smarter we get, the better we get at destroying each other. No amount of medical advancements can undo the earth-shattering evolution of warfare. The growth of humanity’s power to do right can’t outrun its own shadow.

Thankfully, Christians don’t have to, in fact cannot count on Man to save himself. The two things distinguishing Paradise from utopia are that it is real and that it comes from on high, not from down below. History is a big mess, but faith says that one day its cohesion will be visible in the light of God’s glory. People will continue to do what people have always done, so don’t hold your breath on mankind finding something new under the sun. Look higher than the sun instead.

What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. — James 4:1-3 (RSV)