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The War Nerd December 15, 2006

Why I Hate WW II
By Gary Brecher
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FRESNO -- Everybody's mad because Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie, Flags of Our Fathers,
bombed. I read this one review that said every citizen ought to go pay to sit
through it even if it is a bad movie, like it's some kind of patriotic duty for me
to put $25 in Clint Eastwood's offshore account. (And yeah, I know movies don't
cost $25 but I can't sit down in a darkened room unless I've got a Humpback-size
diet coke in one hand, a Maxi-tub popcorn in the other, and a spare clip of Milk
Duds in my ammo pocket.)

I've got my own theory about why all these WW II movies went down in flames like
Zeros in the Marianas Turkey Shoot: because WW II is way overrated. Next to the guy
who directed Pearl Harbor, the men who set that war in motion and made all the
decisions from 1939-1945 were the biggest idiots in history. And that's why all the
lessons of WW II, everything it's supposed to teach us, is either dead wrong or as
obvious as a ballpeen hammer in your face, so obvious that even Barney could teach
it to his diaper demographic between commercial breaks.

The biggest lie about WW II is that it was a war between good and evil. Bullshit,
because there were no good European countries.

Fact No1: They Were ALL Fascists. At a military level, let's face a nasty fact: WW
II was Stalin vs. Hitler. The rest was window dressing. Stalin won because--because
what, he was a nicer guy? Nope, he won because his brand of fascism was actually
way more ruthless and bloody and effective than Hitler's smalltime snobbery, and
because Stalin had the whole US industrial machine backing him. There's no moral
lesson in that that I can see.

Of course, most of these WW II fans try real hard not to think about Stalin, so
they prefer to think about Britain and the rest of Western Europe. Those are
officially the good guys. Well, got some bad news for you: they were all fascists
too, just weaker than Stalin and Hitler, more sly and suckup-y. The only lesson
they've got to offer is that if you want to survive, start out as a raving fascist
and when that becomes uncool, turn coward and start pretending you were always in
favor of niceness.

Europe before Stalingrad was an alien planet, as crazy and bloodthirsty as any
Aztec priest. Nobody realizes the complete flip-flop Europe did in 1945. Before
that, it was a continent full of insane fascists. Some were braver, better
soldiers, or smarter; those are the only real differences.

And when I say "smarter," I don't want to overdo it, because the Greatest
Generation was a bunch of morons. Hitler was the stupidest of all, I grant you
that, but he was just the standout in graduating class full of mongoloids in
fedoras. Take Churchill, who's supposed to be a God of courage and decency and
smarts. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Churchill was a buffoon. He was the moron who got
Allied armies into useless Mediterranean campaigns in both World Wars. Gallipoli
had Churchill's autograph all over it, and he was so stupid he tried the same crap
25 years later with the Italian adventure. He had this obsession with the "soft
underbelly of Europe" which conveniently forgot about these things called "mountain
ranges," like the Alps and the Apennines.

There's another inconvenient fact about Churchill: he was a fascist too, every bit
as much as Hitler. Only thing is, you can't blame him much for that, because, and I
want y'all to listen up here, everybody in Europe was a fascist until 1943--if they
were quick on the uptake enough to see the Wehrmacht was doomed--or 1944, by which
time it was obvious even to the moron majority that fascism was now officially
taboo. I repeat: everybody in Europe. Fascist to the core.

Churchill's one and only reason for fighting Hitler was that he didn't want Germany
challenging England for world domination. In 1936, Churchill told a British
general, "Germany is getting too strong; we must smash her." That was his only
objection to the Nazis. No way he could have minded their brutality, because
Churchill was always in favor of violence against anybody who opposed British
interests. Long before the war, he supported using concentration camps for the Boer
women and kids, strafing Indian villages--and here's his enlightened democratic
quote on how to deal with the Iraqi Kurds, everybody's favorite persecuted
minority, from a 1919 memo: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned [sic] gas
against uncivilized tribes."

That doesn't make him a bad guy; it just makes him a standard European, pre-1945.
They were all like that, only more so. You can go down the list of European
countries and come up with a list of homegrown fascist parties, all totally popular
and democratic, that make the Nazis look like squeamish moderates. Some of them,
like the Iron Guard in Romania, make even me flinch.

And if we rotate the globe, voila!: the Asian theatre also turns out to be a
classic battle of fascism vs...more fascism. The Imperial Japanese military caste
was beyond fascist. Seriously, they were so hardcore that it was taboo even to
suggest the possibility of anything going wrong with the grand plan for total
victory, which is why nobody dared to develop anything resembling a strategic plan.
That was a good way to get yourself hacked into Kobe beef. The Japanese brass
responded like Travis Bickle to questions like that: "You talkin' to us? You askin'
us that question? Cuz we don't see any other Japanese brass around here..." Cut to:
arterial sprays where the insolent questioner used to be.

And in the opposite corner: Chiang Kai Shek, the Asian Churchill: a totally
incompetent military leader and lifelong fascist who saw how the wind was blowing
and repackaged himself as a crusader for democracy in order to get aid from the
gullible Americans. Chiang only valued one thing: obedience. And he only trusted
one guy: himself. That's why he personally held 82 official positions in China,
including head of all the armed services. He picked his generals for their
incompetence, because he suspected that talented men might turn against him. Any
sign of independent thinking, never mind criticism, meant the chop, and I mean that
literally. Chiang even had himself declared the head of the Chinese Boy Scouts,
that breeding ground of coups. That was the Good Guy of the Asian theatre. Oh wait,
I'm forgetting Mao, another champion of human rights.

Even the noncombatant states were fascist before the Marshall Plan showed dictators
that there was more profit in talking nice. Countries tried to copy the big, bad
fascists with little comedy monsters of their own, like Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic or Peron in Argentina. And in their humble way, all these guys did their
best to do their worst. Trujillo actually tried to prove that the Dominicans were
the lost tribe of Aryanism, and ordered something like 30,000 Haitian immigrants
hacked to death with machetes for being "black." Even the Mexicans tried to do the
Fascist two-step, only being Mexican they went for the gaudiest color they could
find, so while Germany had the brownshirts and Mussolini had the blackshirts,
Mexico came up with...the Gold Shirts! "And put some frilly cuffs on that while
you're at it!"

After Stalingrad, the world's fascists just figured out that if you wanted to win,
you needed US backing like Stalin got, and that meant you needed a cleaner line of
patter than the Nazis and Japanese used. Those hick Jerries and Japs talked death,
skulls, slaughter, suicide--tsk tsk, way uncool. Stalin, on the other hand, talked
peace, friendship between peoples, justice for the working class...and not only
killed far more civvies than Hitler did but got funded for it by the American
taxpayer. It was the original no-brainer--which was lucky because this was the
Dumbest Generation since the Thirty Years War.

Fact No2: The Holocaust is a One-Shot Exception; Genocide DOES Pay.

The Holocaust is the next-biggest non-lesson of WW II. Everybody loves to talk


about this particular case of genocide because it failed, or so we're told. The
Germans paid a terrible price for what they did to the Jews. Nope; the Germans paid
a terrible price for invading Russia. If they'd stuck to holding their half of
Eurasia, Stalin would have continued his love affair with Hitler, the only human
being he ever liked, and the European Jews would have been a shared buffet, divvied
up between concentration camps flying the swastika or the red star.

What made the Holocaust totally unlike most genocides is that we remember the
victims; and the only reason we do is, once again, the USA. The European Jews were
totally vulnerable and despised over there, but their kin in America were doing
fine and cared enough to remember their relatives who died. Compare this to almost
any other example of genocide, and there are literally thousands of examples, and
you'll see the difference: most of the time (I mean DUH!) the tribe that gets
genocided is the most despised, weak and helpless tribe in the region. That means
nobody remembers them at all, or if they do they consider the genocide an example
of Progress, or just one of those things. If you doubt that, then tell me quick
what tribe lived 400 years ago in the city where you're reading this now. I still,
after years of trying to find out, don't know what tribe lived around Fresno.
Nobody even mentions them on the web--that's how most genocides work. The tribe
vanishes forever. That's why they call it genocide, for God's sake! And once it's
gone--Duh!--nobody remembers it or cares.

The reason people love to talk about Nazis killing Jews is that, thanks to the Jews
in America, there were people who insisted on remembering the victims. If people
thought about the genocide of, say, the tribe that lived where you lived, they'd
get bummed. They'd realize the world is a slaughterhouse and there are no moral
lessons. That's why they'd rather talk about Auschwitz than...Fresno.

Fact No3: There Are NO Military Lessons to Be Learned from WW II

This is my real pet peeve about WW II, because frankly I care way more about bad
military history than all that moral bla-bla. Every military lesson people WANT to
take away from WW II is wrong, and the one they COULD learn is the one they don't
want to learn.

So for starters, here's the real lesson of the war: military superiority in the
narrow sense isn't nearly as important as economic strength and propaganda working
in tandem.

Now that is a real depressing lesson for all military buffs, and one that took me
years to accept, but we have to face it. If military superiority settled things,
the Germans and Japanese would have won because they were by far, and I mean by
FAR, the best soldiers. A military historian with the unlucky name of Nutter has
done a really good job of demolishing the hometown writers who try to assert that
allied troops came close to Wehrmacht soldiers in combat power. I'll leave it to
him to deal with diehard Greatest Generation fans:
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/introduction.aspx

Until Hitler poured its strength out on the Russian wasteland the Wehrmacht had
total supremacy. Once you realize that you can drop a lot of myths, such as the
crap that the French were cowards and the Brits brave heroes. The French lost
because they had a land border with Germany, period. The British Army did as badly
or worse than the French in combat with the Wehrmacht during the invasion of
France, and survived for one reason: Hitler, the moron, had this idea that Britain
would stand with him against Bolshevism when the Brits came to their senses, so he
cancelled the invasion, codenamed Operation Sea Lion. If the invasion had gone
ahead, Churchill's speech about fighting them on the beaches, etc., would have had
a sequel: "We shall fight them on the beaches...for about ten minutes. We shall
fight them in the hills...for about a week," and so on.

The key military struggle of the war was on the plains of Russia, and Hitler lost
not because he was evil--what, Stalin wasn't just as evil?--but because he was too
much of a snobby hick idiot to look for allies. If he'd courted the Belorussians,
Ukrainians, Poles, the peasant landholders forced onto kolkhozes and all the other
anti-Commie groups in Eastern Europe he'd have won hands down. And if Stalin had
been one smidgen LESS evil, he'd have lost anyway. Stalin won because his soldiers
were way more afraid of the NKVD than the Nazis. If a Russian soldier was captured,
he was considered a traitor. If he retreated, the commissars were waiting to shoot
him. If he bitched, he'd have his fingernails removed and end up begging to be
shot.

So the real legacy of this shitty war was a Soviet world, where the way to win is
to mix propaganda about love and peace for grabbing US tax dollars with a new kind
of violence, a mean cowardly kind that happened in Moscow basement interrogation
cells, with 70-year sentences to Office World as the alternative for us lucky
Fresno-ites.

Everything they told you is wrong. Everything you believe is wrong, and worse than
that--it's dull, too. At least the fascists tried to make it interesting for us
non-execs, non-surfers, non-golfers. They were brutal scum, sure...but I have to
ask, "compared to who--YOU assholes?"

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