These Two False Lessons From World War 2 Are Destroying The West

More and more people are waking up to the fact that a lot of narratives in our history books are propaganda rather than truth. Tucker Carlson recently interviewed the historian Darryl Cooper on his podcast which caused a lot of uproar. During the interview, Cooper questioned some key established truths about World War 2. In his view, the entire post war world order is based on some lessons from the defeat of Hitler that are questionable. He argues that it is an absolute taboo to questions these lessons, as that would lead to the collapse of the current world order. To proof him wrong, a lot of his critics immediately went public to demand that Cooper should be cut out of the public discourse.

He is obviously correct. I have long held the view that we have learned some false lessons from this war that are actually quite dangerous. However, only in the last few years it become clear to me, how important those wrong lessons are in explaining the downfall of the free west. They are of course not the only reason, but they are important. In particular, there seem to be two false conclusions from the historic events that are devastating.

But before I get into these, let me just make a disclaimer for the more simple minded readers of my blog. I have been a libertarian for my entire adult life. As such, I have no sympathies for the Nazis. I am neither a nationalist nor a socialist, and I am certainly not a national socialist. I want to live in a free society with as little state interference as possible.

The Nazis were pretty much the polar opposite of libertarianism. They were murderous authoritarians, who favoured a hugely powerful and intrusive state. I don’t even need history books to know that Hitler established a nasty dictatorship. I grew up in Germany, and the generation growing up and fighting under the Nazis were my grandparents. I have heard many anecdotes in private conversations how nasty this regime was.

In particular, I have no sympathy for their totally unscientific racial ideology that divided people into Über- and Untermenschen. This ideology, coupled with their philosophy of eugenics, was always going to lead to mass murder. And I have no doubt that that is what happened. This regime systematically murdered millions of totally innocent people. The Nazis, therefore, truly were evil and I have no doubt or disagreement with that.

As a consequence, I agree that the world is better of without the Hitler regime. I should also point out, that I am one of the winners of WW2, as it allowed me to grow up in a relatively free Germany. The key question however is, what was the cost of getting rid of the Nazis? I am talking about the costs in terms of lives lost, wealth destroyed, and what did replace them in the end.

Contrary to markets, politics always tries to hide the costs. On the market, the question is not, do you want to drive a Ferrari, yes or no. The real question is rather, how much are you willing to give up in exchange for driving that Ferrari. In other words, what are the costs involved. And this is a complex question that everyone will answer differently.

But that is not how politics works. Every policy is always portrayed as objectively beneficial. To achieve that, only the winners are mentioned and potential costs and losers are being concealed as much as possible. In this regard, war is no different than any other policy. Sure, it is obvious that fighting a war has costs. However, once a war has started, the question of whether those costs are worth the fight is never really permitted. The standard tactic to get people to go along with this is to portray the enemy as pure evil. Once the narrative is established that the war is fought to defeat evil, almost every cost seems acceptable to win.

This was certainly what happened with WW2. And it was done to the extreme. Till this day, Hitler is not seen as a realistic human being, with good and bad characteristics. Instead he is probably the closest thing to the devil becoming human. We are presented with a comic book like villain. Everything about Hitler is pure evil.

Many people do not seem to realise that the Nazis did not see themselves as evil. They thought they were fighting a just fight to make the world a better place. However mistaken they were about this, it is not clear that they intentions were bad. Instead, the Nazis are a good example of evil coming from good intentions. They share this with other idealistic ideologies that ended up murdering a large amount of people.

But even assuming that the Nazis were trying to do good in their own mind is too much for most people. It is also not acceptable to argue that maybe the Nazis had some legitimate concerns, like the fear of the spread of communism. All of this introduces a level of complexity that most people don’t seem to be able to handle. The Nazis were evil to the core, period, and Hitler was the devil. Consequently, if you are fighting the devil, almost anything seems permissible to win.

Let us have a look at what the costs were to defeat this devil. On the free world side of the alliance, there were hundreds of thousands of dead young men. After the war, Britain was bankrupted. The once free trading nation was increasingly turned into a centrally planned economy. The welfare state grew massively. As a consequence, Britain went from one of the most prosperous and powerful nations in the world to the sick man of Europe.

The US had to pay for the war not only in blood, but with a now newly established income tax. The income tax was seen as voluntary before the war, as the supreme court had ruled that it was unconstitutional. To be fair, the tax was really introduced shortly before WW1. One can make a good argument that WW2 was just a continuation of WW1. WW2, however, made the income tax mandatory, as it was unpatriotic not to pay.

Can you imagine how much more free the entire world would be today, if the US still would not have an income tax? Without a US income tax, most other countries would not be able to afford one either. In addition to the income tax, the US established a military industrial complex that would soon become what we now call the deep state.

The biggest cost of fighting Hitler, however, was that liberal democracies had to engage in a military alliance with Stalin. All of Eastern Europe would after the war fall under the rule of this evil communist empire. By the time the Nazis started their murder campaigns, the Soviet Union had already murdered more people than the Nazis ended up doing. And the communists would then go on and murder even more people after the war.

It is amazing to me that the narrative in the west about WW2 is that freedom won over evil. Sure, some people were more free after the war then before. As I said, I myself, most likely, grew up in a more free country than I would have if WW2 had ended differently. But remember what I said about politics always trying to show the winners and conceal the losers? This is an extreme case of that.

There can be no doubt that the biggest winner of the war, with not even a close second, was communism. Most people who were involved in the war ended up less free, with vastly bigger governments after the war than they had before the war. As already explained, that was certainly true for the US and Britain.

Sure, Eastern Europe would have either been swallowed up by Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Not a good choice. Either one would have been worse than what they had before. However, the intervention of the western powers did not save them from that. In fact, a good case can be made that this intervention just prolonged the war and the suffering.

When it comes to picking sides between those two terrible choices, it is not clear what would have been worse. There is no objective way of determining that, it is an individual choice. Personally, if you put a gun to my head, I would have probably preferred Nazi Germany over Stalin’s Russia. That is because, I would have not been on a direct kill list of the Nazis.

For the people not on such a kill list, life was probably better under Hitler than under Stalin. Unless one was engaging in political activities, under the Nazis, one could have had a self owned family home and run one’s own small business. The level of interference in personal life under the Nazis was less than under Stalin.

In Stalin’s Soviet Union, on the other hand, no one was safe. Everyone was at risk of being deported or executed. One was also told exactly where to live and where to work, with family life being severely disrupted. Children were told that their real parents were the state. This seems far more totalitarian to me than Nazi rule. But, as I said, I don’t want either. I want to ideally life in a free society. That choice, however, was not on offer for the people in Eastern Europe. I, of course, also understand that the people on the Nazi kill list would have probably made a different choice than me.

My point is not to show that the Nazis were objectively better than Stalin. My point is rather to show that there is no objective preference for a freedom loving person of one over the other. This is relevant, because the official narrative is that WW2 was a war of good vs. evil. Let us not forget that Britain and the US also did some truly evil things during the war. The world is never black and white. However, I do of course agree that on balance they were significantly better than Hitler or Stalin. Why, however, did these “good guys” chose an alliance with Stalin against Hitler? That is difficult to understand.

Seeing Stalin and Hitler fighting each other, it would have most likely been more beneficial for liberty in the world to just stay out of it and not support one side over the other. First of all, this would have kept the war smaller. A smaller war means less destruction. Secondly, as already mentioned, Britain and the US would have been definitely more free staying out of the war. But not just them. If Hitler and Stalin would have fought each other without interference, both sides would have come out weaker on the other side. No one really wins in war even if one wins the war. Lastly, in hindsight, one can not argue that the people in between those two dictatorships needed to be saved. They were de facto not saved. Even the Holocaust obviously happened and was not prevented.

How, then, is the idea sold that it was a good thing to intervene on the side of Stalin against Hitler? There seem to be two arguments. The first one is that there was no choice, but to intervene. After all, the Nazis wanted to conquer the whole world. If Hitler had not been stopped, the whole world would now be speaking German.

This argument, however, makes no sense. First of all, what is the evidence that Hitler wanted to conquer the whole world? His expressed goals were to fight the Soviet threat, to win back territories that were lost in WW1, and to create an empire (Lebensraum) for Germans in Eastern Europe. The Nazis therefore were indeed a threat to some people, but not at all for the whole world. I don’t see any evidence that either Britain or the US had much to fear from them.

The Soviets, on the other hand, were very clear about the fact that they were planning to spread communism everywhere. I mean, it really would take a special kind of stupid to assume that the threat is that expressed nationalists will conquer the world and, as a consequence, ally against them with an equally totalitarian dictatorship, whose official anthem is The Internationale.

I cannot imagine they were that stupid. Instead I think this argument was an excuse to disguise the real interests of fighting this war. Those were, almost certainly, less humanitarian and had more to do with old school geopolitical power interests.

However, even if one assumes that the Nazis really wanted to conquer the world, how could they have possibly done that? This obviously takes a lot of resources. So far, every empire eventually ended up bankrupted. Even the US, which had probably more resources than any other empire due to its highly productive capitalist economy, is now bankrupted thanks to its empire.

The Nazis, however, were no free marketeers. They were socialists who believed in a highly state managed economy. People who make the argument that the world would be speaking German now if the Nazis had not been stopped, essentially give away how much they believe in the ability of the state to run a productive economy. They give away that they clearly think that national socialism is a sustainable model to run a society.

In reality, the Nazis would have very quickly run out of resources to finance their empire. There can be no doubt that, even if the US and Britain had not entered the war, Paris would now still be French speaking. The French resistance would have made the occupation pretty quickly economically unsustainable for the Nazis. The US empire even got kicked out of Afghanistan by a bunch of goat herders. It is very expensive to occupy another country with a hostile population.

So no, the Nazis were not a threat to the whole world. Not only is there no evidence that they were planning to conquer everyone, if they had tried that, they would have quickly found out that there are hard natural limitations to what they could have achieved. They would have also faced the reality that their ideology is bogus. Hitler was certainly a threat to some of his neighbours, especially to the east. However, again, most of these neighbours were not spared a totalitarian rule despite the entry of Britain and the US into the war.

By the way, the suspicion that the people fighting the war for freedom didn’t really believe in freedom is supported by the West German constitution. This document is not a very clear commitment to capitalism. Article 14.2 limits the right to property by saying “Property entails responsibility”. This article says that property is only granted as much as it serves the greater good of society, a severe limitation that could ultimately justify an outright communist system. And believe me, all socialists in Germany are constantly quoting that part of the constitution. Freedom of speech has a similar limitation in the constitution. It is therefore questionable, how much the people writing the constitution really believed in liberty.

The other argument for an interference in the war is that Hitler was just the absolute worst. One owed it to humanity to stop him. However, as I already explained, it is not clear why Hitler was worse than some other dictatorships of the 20^th century, including Stalin. I never understood this argument. I think it is fabricated to the extreme. The conclusion comes before the facts.

The argument is so baseless, that I have trouble explaining it. Apparently, Hitler was worse, because of the systematic approach the Nazis had to the genocide. In school they taught us that it was the industrial style extermination that made the Nazis more evil than every other dictatorship. However, many genocides were carefully planned. The Holomodor in Ukraine for example did not just take place spontaneously. A lot of planning and careful execution went into it. Besides, why does the degree of organisation that goes into a genocides matter for how immoral it is? Is a simple plan to murder less evil than a complex one? I cannot see why that would be the case.

The other argument is that the killing method was just so efficient. That is where we learn about gas chambers, whose function in the Holocaust must not be questioned. The obsession with gas chambers always seemed a bit weird to me. I cannot see why gas chambers are more evil than mass execution via shootings, for example. Sure, there are nicer ways to go than poison gas. However, as far as execution methods go, humans have come with far more cruel ways to kill people than that. The US is still using gas chambers as a method of execution today. The land of the free clearly does not think it is too cruel for a liberal democracy.

Gas chambers are also not more efficient than other ways of killing people. The Nazis did not seem to use them because they wanted to find a way to kill more people more quickly. The reason why they experimented with them was, because of the heavy physical and mental toll mass shootings had on their soldiers executing the orders. Shootings, however, can achieve a higher kill rate than a gas chamber. Besides, there are weapons of mass destruction, like atomic bombs, which can wipe out whole cities in seconds. Why would that be more moral than gas chambers?

The whole argument that the Nazis were worse than any other dictatorship really seems a bit forced. Sure, I agree, they were one of the worst, but not the worst. For the official narrative, however, they just have to be the worst, otherwise an alliance with Stalin looks morally questionable. That, however, is exactly what it was. It simply makes no sense to ally with Stalin against Hitler and call that a victory for the free world.

The myths about WW2 have become the foundations of the post WW2 world order. And these foundations are rotten, which is why we are seeing it collapsing at the moment. In my view, we have learned two false lessons from this war that have slowly destroyed us from within.

The first lesson is that military interventions are a good tool to spread freedom and democracy around the world. After all, it worked so well in WW2. Except it did not work at all in WW2. The main result of that war was not more freedom but more tyranny and statism. It is therefore not surprising that every time the US and her allies tried to use the same tactic after WW2 the result was the same. Freedom was lost, the state grew and lives and wealth were destroyed.

Since the US has engaged in many such wars, large parts of its once free economy are now in the hands of the military industrial complex. The state has grown to such a giant leviathan that it is now more and more suffocating society. All the resources that were funnelled into the hands of the complex have created a giant powerful deep state that is now difficult to get rid of. The land of the free is no more.

At the same time, the west, especially the US, is increasingly hated around the world. That was not always the case. Before the US became this giant empire, most people looked to it as beacon of hope. Finally a country in which little people had a chance. Many were dreaming the American dream. Those times are long gone. Now the US and her NATO allies are seen as bullies and one of the major obstacle to peace in the world. And I cannot see any flaws in that reasoning.

Despite all these negative consequences, it is WW2 that provides the main argument for the interventionists. Everyone who is opposing the next military adventure is an evil appeaser, and every opponent of the US becomes the new Hitler. The interventionists – neocons as they are often called – simply cannot, or do not want to, see that their entire argument is based on a false lesson from history.

An even more devastating lesson from the war, however, is that communists became the good guys. After the war, everyone who was opposing them had to fight against accusations of being a Nazi. William F. Buckley Jr. famously lost his temper in a debate with Gore Vidal when Vidal called him a crypto-Nazi. Buckley threatened to punch him in the face. He knew, how devastating that accusation was, given the mainstream lessons from WW2. I am not aware that anyone on the left lost his temper in a similar way being called a communist sympathiser. To the contrary, many on the left are very open about their sympathies for communism. Whenever communism is under attack one can hear the distracting defence that communism freed the world of Hitler.

If we had learned the correct lesson, which is that dictatorships come in many colours, each of which can be horrific, we would have had different debates. In that case, too much power for the state could have become the real target of criticism. Instead, we have learned that first and foremost, we have to prevent fascist, as in not openly communist, dictatorships, as they are worse than any other. This has given the communists an excellent cover for their crimes and has enabled them to rise. Being right wing essentially became illegal after the war, with everyone who still wanted to oppose the left walking on thin ice. If we had had a more balanced debate, it would have likely kept the extreme statist views of the left and right in check.

We now reap the results. Pretty much any western country has been taken oven by communists as it is till this day very difficult to organise an effective opposition force against them. Too much energy has to be spend defending such a force against accusations of racism and fascism. This is slowly changing, as we are now at the point where all that state intervention as started to destroy the core foundations of our civilisation. The defenders of egalitarian central planning are desperately trying to call their opponents far right, in the hope that they can extend the life spam of this cheap trick a bit longer. However, this sword is increasingly blunt. With this change comes a different view of what we were told about history. It is good that we are finally having this debate, but I hope it is not too late.