Posted on 09/05/2009 4:40:15 AM PDT by Clive
Seventy years ago this week Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, ignited the most cataclysmic war in history.
Some six years later, with over 60 million dead, a Holocaust conceived as the Final Solution for European Jewry, killing fields that left most of Europe scarred and, finally, the unleashing of atomic weapons over Japan, the carnage ended.
Mighty volumes of the war's history have been written. Memoirs, official records and grisly details of unimaginable sufferings of victims have been published. Documentaries and record numbers of movies have been produced to understand how and why civilization could break down so utterly.
In retrospect it was a human calamity brought about by the quintessential fact of man's inherent fallibility and his dilemma when confronted with evil.
Winston Churchill would later say, "There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action."
Seventy years later we still live in the shadows of the war Hitler started, and its consequences remain with us.
From the perspective of Sept. 11, 2001, and the terrorist attacks on America's heartland, the lasting effect of the Second World War has been the near fatal weakening of will, or self-confidence, in the values of enlightenment that set the West as a civilization apart from others in the making of the modern world.
The war was immensely costly in human lives. But the cost that cannot be tallied in numbers was the loss of will, the erosion of belief over time in values of freedom, reason and democracy that are always imperilled when left inadequately protected.
Even before the war finally ended with Japan's surrender, the result of the May 1945 election in Britain -- the defeat of Churchill's Conservative party to Clement Attlee's Labour party -- set the scene for an unseemly retreat of the western colonial powers from Asia and Africa.
The manner in which Britain handed over its imperial legacy -- nearly 200-year presence in and rule over India -- and the haste with which demands for independence was conceded by partitioning what was once her crown jewel, set the template for her retreat from the Middle East and Africa.
Other European colonial powers would follow on the heels of Britain sooner or later, or as France would be compelled to do so. But for the timely resolve of president Harry Truman's America to contain the expansionist former Soviet Union, the red tide of communism might well have rolled further westward across Europe and into the Middle East.
The Cold War, or the containment of the Soviet Union for nearly half a century that took Americans into Korea and then Vietnam, would have its deleterious effects on the United States as the Second World War did on Europe.
Guilt
Doubts, skepticism and, most importantly, guilt -- the hallmark of the western civilization -- would take its toll on the West that was once confident of its civilizational values.
Penance in politics might well take many forms and multiculturalism in the West is one form of atoning for sins of colonialism in the past.
On the 70th anniversary of the most horrendous war in history there is grief and remembrance, yet the loss of the West's self-confidence is also palpable in its inability to name the evil raging since at least 9/11.
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World still lives in the shadow of WW1
The U.S. still lives in the shadow of the war of northern aggression.
True that. That war can be directly shown to be the start of the growth of the U.S. federal government. Lincoln took and used powers that no president before him did.
World still lives in the shadow of the Magna Carta.
Some VERY astute comments by some obviously very historically literate FReepers. I take issue with the one about the Magna Carta, though. I cite Bill Clinton, Charlie Rangel, Ted Kennedy, and God only knows how many other corrupt, thieving, lying Democrats who remain in office despite any efforts to dislodge them. The Magna Carta is dead, gentlemen - unless you’re a Republican or conservative.
Just when the zer0bama crowd thought it was safe to crap on the constitution....War Between the States II
When someone mentions global warming, typically I ask, “Have you ever heard of World War II?”
The firebombing of cities, 100s of sunken oil tankers, 100s of other ships destroyed and sunk, nuclear bombs detonating, destruction of oil refineries and burning oil fields, whole cities bombed to rumble, the list goes on and on...
The point being, I ask them, with all the destruction and unprecedented pollution, “Why wasn’t the weather affected?”
>>On the 70th anniversary of the most horrendous war in history there is grief and remembrance, yet the loss of the West’s self-confidence is also palpable in its inability to name the evil raging since at least 9/11.
Does this idiot really think that guilt over WW2 (which we won, BTW!) is the reason we can’t call a terrorist a terrorist?
The reason is because we didn’t take Patton’s advice and re-arm the Germans and point them East with the US military machine right behind them. Then when leftists started popping up in classrooms and newsrooms, we didn’t take the appropriate action—which involves a rope and tree.
Get rid of the leftists and we’ll not only call a terrorist a terrorist, we’ll invent some much more insulting terms, flush lots of Korans, bacon would be on the menu every day at Guantanamo, and Lyndie England would be a pop-culture hero!
It can happen again.
LLS
One could view WWII as western civilization on trial. One could also ask, why did western civilization try to tear itself apart? What do you think?
The world still lives in the shadow of the War of Jenkins’ Ear.
You mean the revolt of the slaveholders?
WW2 was more of a civil war for western civilization than a trial.
The period since WW2 has been the trial because we got to see the evil and horror of uncontrolled Marxism in the form of the Nazis and Stalin’s USSR, and yet western civilization has slowly embraced those same systems and are letting the freedoms that evolved in the West for 800 years wither and die in exchange for the promise of a handout from a potential tyrant.
Beg to differ. Big time.
WWII was merely the second act in the self-detonation of western civilization that started in 1914.
In fact, WWII, which as Churchill stated could have been so easily prevented, was not prevented very largely because of the loss of civilizational self-confidence that was a result of WWI.
In early 1914 the western world had enormous confidence in itself, much of it arguably inappropriate. In early 1939 it was full of doubts and fears.
WWII didn't change anything in this regard. It merely accelerated an already existing trend.
Don’t forget we are still under shadow of Regan’s invasion of Grenada.
“...You mean the revolt of the slaveholders?...”
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I suppose you are one of those who believes
the Revolutionary War was all about tea.
Maybe you will refer to the next one
as the great health care war...
I touched a nerve.
Those slaveholders still have some people fooled. It’s a good thing they were defeated, but Roosevelt kept getting re-elected and imposing his socialism on us by making a deal (a new deal) with those former slaveholders, without whom the Democrat party could not have dominated until the election of Reagan.
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