Topic: Decline of the West
From time to time people ask me to recommend books about the Second World War. Now obviously where so vast a subject is concerned no such recommendation is adequate. Still, a request for assistance with self-education is never to be spurned. Generally I ask a couple of questions to see how much the requestor already knows, what his interests may be, etc. and with that information in hand I suggest two or three titles.
Our direct collective memory of the Second World War is fading as the generation that lived through it passes out of this world. My mother and father actually received the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. They personally experienced America’s abrupt transition from peace to war and all that flowed from that moment. For their sons and daughters, the members of my own generation, the war still loomed large: I myself was born only four years after the surrender of Japan. Practically every man of my father’s age was a veteran of the war. Our mailman was a former Marine who’d served on Guadalcanal. One of my dad’s coworkers had been a B-17 tail gunner and another served as an infantryman in northwest Europe. (He once remarked that he’d traveled all the way from Normandy to the Rhine, crawling on his belly.)
So I’ve always felt close to the Second World War; it was an event whose echoes sounded down the years when I was growing up. But younger people know comparatively little about it. Many could not say in what year the war began and in what year it ended, or which countries fought on which side. A lot has happened since V-J Day and a person born, say, in 1975 cannot be expected to have a personal sense of connection to what must seem a long-ago event, not particularly relevant today.
But as William Faulkner put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” The Second World War was one of those grand historical turning points, like the fall of the Roman Empire or the rise of Islam. It didn’t merely change the world but recreated it—and not necessarily in a welcome or positive way. The more I reflect on the war, the more it seems to me that it left us with a terrible moral wound. To overcome a most evil enemy, fascism, the democracies including America had to some extent assume the character of that enemy. However necessary one may feel it to have been, the strategic bombing campaign that the Allies carried out against Germany and the one that America alone carried out against Japan were shocking acts of barbarism. But of course at the time they shocked few people. Nor in the years after the war did the people of America and Britain express revulsion at what had been done. On the contrary, both countries—and their former ally, the USSR—bent their efforts toward the development and deployment of even more terrible weapons of mass destruction.
Then there’s the business of the Soviet alliance. In order to defeat Hitler, American and Britain embraced a comparable monster, Stalin. That the Soviet Union participated in the Nuremburg war crimes trials, evil judging evil, is problematical to say the least. While his minions were prosecuting former Nazi leaders for crimes against humanity and acts of aggression, Stalin was grinding Poland under his heel, with hymns to the UN and international law tinkling in the background.
From things like this, I believe, are derived some defining characteristics of our time, such as the replacement of compassion by sentimentality. We grow misty-eyed over the plight of animals but disregard the plight of fellow human beings who are persecuted, oppressed, hounded to death. The gruesome revelations about Planned Parenthood’s traffic in fetal body parts are greeted with rationalizations or shrugs. That human bodies and human beings may be treated as commodities seems unremarkable to us and there are plenty of intellectuals who give voice to it—approvingly. And even our sentimentality has a brute quality, with demands for the persecution and lynching of transgressors. I cannot help but feel that the Second World War with its vast slaughter paved the way to this place of confusion, this moral wilderness in which we find ourselves.
What book to read, then, if you want to learn about the Second World War? Rather than round up the usual suspects—I may do that on some other occasion—let me recommend The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, which I believe to be one of the great twentieth-century American novels. Suppose the Second World War had gone the other way? How would the world be different? Or would it be much different at all? Having stepped through Mr. Dick’s looking glass and spent some time in his alternate universe, I’m not at all sure about the answers to those questions.
