No, the Nazis and Soviets weren’t the good guys
Read my full column on the Washington Examiner website.
Despite the sheer craziness of the political and cultural landscape in recent months, one particularly nutty 2024 bingo-card item none of us expected began with the bizarre argument that the Nazis were somehow the victims of World War II. And now it’s morphed into the equally absurd claim that the Soviet Union was morally superior to the apparently war-crime-obsessed Western Allies.
This largely started with famed foreign policy expert Candace Owens, who tried to frame the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as an attack on Christians who were “burned alive on Ash Wednesday.” She also argued that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki targeted Christians, with “the bomb dropped 300 yards from a Catholic Church.” And who can forget her declaration that “Americans know nothing about real history” because “12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed after WW2.”
Even the laziest Google search shows that this number relates to the Germans who fled or were expelled from east-central Europe back into (West) Germany and Austria — because there are consequences for starting and losing the bloodiest act of conquest in human history.
But this level of ignorance isn’t limited solely to those who believe that the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem is tantamount to a Muslim ghetto. Speaking with Piers Morgan, professor John Mearsheimer pushed the latest act of historical revisionism: praising the Soviet Union for managing to fight without resorting to the supposed airborne barbarity of the United States and Great Britain.
“If you look at how the Soviets fought, who were basically responsible for defeating the Nazis in World War II, they did not commit many war crimes in the process of defeating the Wehrmacht,” Mearsheimer argued. “It was basically a ground war where the Soviets, the Red Army, rolled up the Wehrmacht. There were no bombing of cities. There were no dropping of nuclear weapons.”
After acknowledging that “there was no question there was a lot of rape and pillaging, especially at the end,” Mearsheimer said “aside from that,” this was not a “purposeful campaign to murder huge numbers of civilians” and the Soviet Union proved it’s possible to fight a ground war between two armies that “avoids the problem of bombing cities and murdering huge numbers of civilians.”
Um … what?
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