“The future is certain,” the Soviet joke goes. “It’s the past that keeps changing.” This wisecrack and its variants hit at one of communism’s central absurdities: The doctrinaire Marxists believed they had the key to understanding all of human affairs, but they constantly had to conceal their many mistakes.
As the party’s ideologists understood well, reconstructing the past is one of the most powerful ways to shape how people understand their identity and influence what they will do. That’s why China held a massive military parade this week commemorating the end of World War II and why so many of America’s and Israel’s critics are recasting that war as an American mistake. Both want to weaken American public support for the grand strategy that made the United States a superpower.
Fresh off the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s latest meeting, Xi Jinping enjoyed a display of China’s might on Wednesday. After arriving flanked by Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, Xi unveiled some of his country’s newest weapons. Laser air-defense systems, airborne and submarine drones, and previously unseen intercontinental missiles rolled by them.
“Today, mankind is faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,” Xi said in Tiananmen Square before adding that the Chinese “firmly stand on the right side of history.” Donald Trump fired back, “please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”
Most Americans take pride in their status as back-to-back world war champions, but the Chinese and Russians take their commemorations to another level. The war is central to their national identities: Chinese Communists see Japan’s invasion as the culmination of China’s “century of humiliation” and boast that their party protects China from further depredations. The Russians claim they saved the world, at tremendous cost, from Nazism. Both see America’s postwar alliances with Germany and Japan as confirmation that the United States is an evil empire.
There are holes in both narratives. The Chinese Communists spent most of the war skulking in the mountains; the Nationalists did the overwhelming majority of the fighting, then lost the subsequent civil war and fled to Taiwan. When Adolf Hitler began his murderous rampage by attacking Poland, the Soviet Union was at his side. As Trump pointed out too, the Americans expended vast amounts of blood and treasure to defeat the Axis powers.
Communism’s expansion across Europe and Asia as a result of the war left many Americans uneasy. As the Oscar-winning The Best Years of Our Lives depicts, the war had barely ended before some lamented the United States should have fought with Germany and Japan against the Communists. These beliefs were always unpopular since, after all, Japan attacked us, Hitler then declared war, and both committed atrocities against captured Americans and civilians. They reached their nadir after the United States won the Cold War and seemed to banish the specter of communism.
At least the earlier generations of revisionists wanted some of America’s enemies to lose. The new ones don’t. A small but determined band of fanatics recently revived the old complaints and are rewriting history. Their motivations are the same as their Soviet forebearers, as is their lack of fidelity to the truth. As historians like Andrew Roberts revealed in these pages and Victor Davis Hanson did elsewhere, they have to obfuscate basic chronology and mangle facts to build their case.
They photoshop history for a purpose. Before Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought they had been tricked into World War I. A majority hoped the Asians and Europeans would sort out their disputes on their own and, if they came to blows, leave the United States out of it. They were wrong, and tens of millions—including over 400,000 Americans—paid with their lives for that mistake. Since then, Americans have moved heaven and earth to prevent another such cataclysm. Their enemies are determined, and foreign policy is a hard and bloody business. The costs have been high. But not nearly as high as another world war.
The revisionists think this strategy is completely misguided. Many want Trump to attack American allies, such as Israel, and they gnash their teeth in rage every time the “death to America” club loses a member. They hope that, by pretending perfidious allies duped Americans into the Second World War, they will weaken public support for the allies whom they want to see destroyed.
Lying about the past can be effective, since the human capacity for self-deception is almost endless. But only almost: As the Soviets discovered, eventually people stop believing the lies.
The Soviet empire collapsed when its subjects started telling the truth. This republic will fall when its citizens stop remembering it.
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