Churchill wrote: ↑Mon Mar 24, 2025 6:36 pm
The mainstream account of 1941-1945 is absolutely comparable to a major religion: virtually the entire moral foundations of the post-war era depend on it.
Remove the mainstream account of 1941-45 and where is the straightforward mainstream defence of post-war liberal democracy and the USA led order? It would ignite an enormous legitimacy crisis.
Even when parts of the post-war order are now subject to pressures since Trump neo-isolationism and rhetorical contempt of liberal processes, rise of populism in Europe, etc, there is ongoing disbelief amongst the mainstream over these crises and confusion over how to actually respond. The keystone of 1941-1945 is therefore not going to be surrendered as without it all political valuations are now subject to question.
The 'post-war order' emerged in reaction to a whole series of blunders and bad moves from 1919 to 1945. If by 1941-45 you're referring to the Holocaust, then no, pretty much none of the postwar architecture of international agreements, much less the reconstruction of west European societies had the slightest thing to do with the Holocaust.
The postwar era has continued because it's
postwar - there were no interstate wars in Europe whatsoever between 1945 and 2022, only some civil wars and breakups (Greek civil war, Yugoslavia, some conflicts on the edges of the former Soviet Union), and the Soviet interventions in a few East Bloc states. The east-west division and Cold War ensured an end to major war in Europe. Many of the immediate 1945 decisions were enacted to guarantee this, including expelling ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to take away the nominal excuses used by Hitler in
1938-39, which triggered WWII with the invasion of Poland.
The US had inadvertently played havoc with the world by its inconsistent mix of diplomatic isolationism coupled with massive investments in the 1920s, followed by the effects of the Great Depression, exacerbated by protectionist tariffs. Planning the postwar order meant addressing these problems, and several involved reorganising the international economic order (Bretton Woods, GATT, IMF, World Bank), others like the Marshall Plan ensured European economic recovery and a general rise in prosperity. The world economy has been much bumpier since the 1970s, with much deindustrialisation coupled with harsher fiscal policies under the auspices of neoliberalism, so there is much to gripe about in western societies as a result because of how these sea changes have impacted different regions and areas. But it would be impossible to fully turn the clock back to a 1950s idyll, and none of the 1920s-1940s economic models on offer (including German Grossraumwirtschaft) were either viable or could have sustained long-term growth.
The US tolerated authoritarian regimes during the Cold War especially if they were anticommunist or even just anti-socialist (Chile, anyone?). That was also true in Europe and nearby (Greece, Turkey, Portugal, Spain), even more true in Latin America and Asia. Nonetheless, democracy was regularly extended through to the 1990s, but has been in retreat
worldwide for the past two decades. Even so, the peaceful change of government in Poland, frequently compared to Orban's illiberal Hungary, shows things can change. Trump's second term is making it much harder for populists in Europe to follow the exact MAGA model, at least for now.
The very fact that the US order included the rest of the world is also why the notion that '1941-45' or the Holocaust is the 'moral foundation' of the postwar order is such bunkum. It just isn't true for most of the world, which had no involvement in anything like it. Even Japanese crimes don't resonate as much in the US-led part of the world order, it's China which fusses more about them now, after only rediscovering Japanese crimes in the 1980s. If one wants to find a European society where 1941-45 is truly a state religion, it's the Russian Federation.
The
foundations of the post-1945 order in western Europe included measures to reverse much older events - 1922 in Italy, 1933 in Germany, the collapse of existing democracies into authoritarian one party states. But as noted there were other states where authoritarianism persisted - resulting in SNL's long-running joke about Franco by the 1970. Conversely, the majority of Germany's allies in WWII were pluralist multi-party polities, and several were entirely democratic.
The persistence of communist states in Eastern Europe made many of the authoritarian measures and forms of repression seen up to 1945 even less attractive, as did abuses elsewhere in the world (Latin American dictatorships, Iran after 1979, etc). There are good reasons why the death penalty has been abolished in much of the world, and why the rule of law is seen as a good thing, and secret police forces as bad things. All of which might be encouraged by memories of 1922-1945 (for western Europe) as much as memories of 1917-1991 (for eastern Europe).
International law certainly developed rapidly after 1945, but many of the measures were stymied by the Cold War or reasons of state for quite some time. The US did not ratify the UN convention on genocide until 1988 and did so with reservations. Human rights were defined in the 1940s but grew in prominence only in the 1970s (with an anti-East Bloc twist via the Helsinki accords). The precedent of international criminal tribunals such as Nuremberg wasn't followed up until the 1990s, and the US then rejected the authority of the International Criminal Court, as it does to this day. The laws of war changed - the Geneva Convention was updated in the 1940s, but it wasn't until the 1970s protocols that the Anglo-American way of (aerial) war was ostensibly restricted more fully - just in time for 'precision targeting' that still goes awry whenever PGMs are used.
International humanitarianism has a longer history than going back to 1941-45, but key events in WWII did set up post-1945 frameworks and expectations. One was the famine in Greece in 1941, which led to the breaking of the British naval blockade and indeed the foundation of Oxfam in 1942. After the temporary relief of UNRRA et al at the end of WWII, it was really the post-decolonisation period that caused humanitarianism to take off. That was also when UN peacekeeping missions proliferated, all familiar stuff over the past six decades or more.
Refugee and asylum issues had already caused massive fallout after WWI - especially because of the Bolshevik Revolution driving so many Russians into exile, but also because of the aftermath of the Armenian genocide. International conventions on refugees and political asylum were reformed after 1945 but the entire era of 1933-45 had seen multiple crises, including the classic form of political refugees. And so it was in the first phase of the Cold War, e.g. the wave of emigres from Hungary after 1956, following earlier waves of East European refugees to Sweden, Canada and elsewhere. Estonians in Sweden and Ukrainians in Canada did much to establish multiculturalism in those societies, well before non-European refugees and immigrants started knocking on western societies' doors. US involvement globally meant that the Cold War, and soon enough the Islamist convulsions from 1979, sent refugees from Asia and the Middle East to America and elsewhere - Vietnamese boat people, Iranians landing in LA fleeing Khomeini, and so on.
The memory of WWII in Europe has always been broader than focusing on the Holocaust. One can identify a Europe-wide emphasis on resistance in the first decades after 1945, and the greater prominence of political KZ prisoners over Holocaust survivors. The Gaullist myth of resistance papered over a further reckoning with collaboration (after the initial violence of the epuration and postwar trials), which crumbled by the 1970s to reconsider Vichy. Sure, the resentful losers on the farther right had gripes about the postwar consensus, and the FN represented them in France, but eventually veterans of the Charlemagne Division died off.
WWII became cultural memory 30-40 years after the event, as predicted in several models of how collective and cultural memory work. It was only in this context that the Holocaust emerged as a mainstream phenomenon, essentially at the end of the 1970s. And even after this, most European societies have not ditched their entirely local memories of German occupation and violence, with several intensifying their interest as time goes on (Poland, anyone?). The same also was true of West Germany, where the Nazi past as a whole became supercharged
from below in the 1970s-1980s. This is when the local KZ or subcamp, the local euthanasia centre, the local treatment of foreign workers became such concerns in Germany.
Post-1990, states as well as the European Union became much more involved. The notion that the Holocaust is the 'moral foundation of the post-war order' is only true for the post-communist era of European integration. The US ended up being not dissimilar, since while the USHMC was set up under Carter, it wasn't until 1993 that USHMM finally opened - after the end of the Cold War. The preceding 15 years after 1978 were certainly marked out by ever increasing attention in the US, Europe and globally, but the 40th anniversary of D-Day, the 40th anniversary of the end of WWII also mattered. The end of the Cold War seemed to enable further reckonings with WWII that had not been possible after 1945 to the same extent, depth or fervour. That, plus the recurrence of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda keeping the past topical.
In the same era, Nazi-sympathising far right parties experienced strong headwinds because of public opposition and because of anti-denial laws. The NPD scored some of its worst results when it was most 'revisionst'. Populism took over, leaving neo-Nazis much less prominent. Thus the death of the BNP and rise of Nigel Farage's many anti-European and populist vehicles. Nick Griffin and the BNP certainly tried rebranding themselves, but reminders of their 1980s antics were immensely damaging and derailed their prospects. But a decade later, Brexit happened, and populism seemingly triumphed - with much noisy rhetoric about Dunkirk and analogies between the EU and Third Reich.
The cultural memory of WWII and the Holocaust has been intensely sustained over the past 30-40 years, in part because of the dying-out of the war generation (the 'Greatest Generation' in the US, thus all the war movies since Saving Private Ryan through to Flags of Iwo Jima), in part because of momentum, in part because yes, now it seems like a foundational myth. But the nature of supposedly "foundational myths" is that they aren't actually foundational. The lag in memory 30-40 years after the event exposes this. And this model works just as well on how memories of Jesus shifted in early Christianity as on why WWII loomed much larger and was interpreted perhaps differently by the 1980s through to the current decade.
Memories will shift over time, as can be clearly seen with the changing sectional and 'national' memories of the American Civil War; it really does take a generation after an event to establish certain paradigms, and those can persist for decades before changing tack in some regards, then resurging later on. The
memorialisation of the ACW and what to do with statues or domesticated commemoration of Confederate generals has been a culture-war flashpoint in the US for 10-15 years now.
China taking more of an interest in WWII and events like the Nanjing massacre from the 1980s onwards shows the dynamic is worldwide. It doesn't matter whether Nanjing is known to Americans in the Midwest (although Iris Chang's book was a best-seller in the 1990s, and Chinese Americans a lot more numerous than they were in the 1960s). The point is how national memories work, and how they then are internationalised, or become objects of international recognition. Thus the wave of resolutions about the Holodomor in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.
WWII as a whole is a more amorphous memory for the world, and one can see quite easily that there are still significantly more WWII movies made internationally as well as in the US or Europe than there are Holocaust movies. Russia, China and other societies aren't going to shut up about the war and sometimes for very different reasons to why the war persists as a bad memory in Poland or a source of delusion in Britain. Time will likely diminish some of this, and also diminish the seeming current prominence of the Holocaust, but the way that WWI memories have been institutionalised as tourist destinations and objects of ongoing interest even after the 2014-2018 centenary suggests that hoping for the full disappearence of a memory rather than it being supplanted by something else or subsiding, is wishful thinking.
At state level, a reminder that there are 27 states in the EU and 32 in NATO so including for now the US, Canada and UK, all with specific memories and interests bundled together. Even if these international organisations broke up or some states made this or that move to react against the 'memory regime', are all the others going to follow suit? Twitter/X can be exceedingly deceptive in making people think 'their' ideas, whether liberal or radical right, are actually popular or prevailing. Just look at the backlash in Canada these past few months to Trump's toddler tantrums.
