Chapter One: Winning the War and losing the Peace.
Defeating Evil and Winning the Second World War.
Winning the Second World War was perhaps the greatest war victory in history. Hitler and the Nazis were evil, dominating and terrorizing first the German folk, and then the other conquered nations into their own will. They were shaped in the cruelty of the Great War. They murdered and used people through militarism to their own self-worship. They wanted military domination, forced labour and unrelenting totalitarian control of people’s lives, faith, families, education and thought. In 1940-41 it looked as though they had succeeded in subduing Europe to their collective will. In their Genocide of the Jews, Gipsies, Homosexuals, Christians and other groups, their deliberate baseless hate was carried into extermination in an act which enhorrors us now. The Holocaust was perhaps the most cruel mass evil in human history. “Our will be done” bestrode the globe, and it was to slaughter and enslave. It still warns of the potential evil of human beings, selling their souls to conquest and empowered by weapons.
And, of course, militarism and its arrogance was their downfall. Those who use weapons perish by them. The attack on the USSR carried the false invincible militaristic hope of victory and conquest, but the USSR stood against them, gradually overcame the aggressor through magnificent victories, and, with the help of the United States and Britain, won the War. When the extermination camps were opened, the measure of the world victory over Nazi evil was established. The fanatical military conquest and subjugation of peoples was itself defeated. Millions of soldiers, sailors and airmen fought with valour to defeat the Nazis and many died heroically in the task. As the evil was great, so those who gathered against it were greater, to the blessing of humankind. This will not be gainsaid. But evil is more complicated than only that.
The Nazis were not merely a lone political group. Rather, Fascism was a world-wide ideology against popular socialism and communism supported by the rich in most countries of the world. It was also a western economic problem; as we saw in War or Peace? The Nazis were supported by Ford, Thyssen, American financiers and a whole range of Fascist sympathisers in France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere and especially by the arms companies and other military interests. They were successful because of the military support they gathered around them. When the Nazis were defeated, this group quickly faded away from publicity around their support of Nazism, but they did not necessarily retreat from their capitalist, military and right-wing views and continued to have influence in the late 40s and fifties in many countries. We need to look at these people carefully, for in fact they helped generated the fully armed world economy.
The Fascist evil was influential in many other states than Germany. In the East, Japan had similarly succumbed to intense militarism and a Fascist lust for empire, especially directed against China. It had hoped for a victory strike against the United States at Pearl Harbour as a result of its military dreams of domination, and then committed appalling atrocities in China, the Philippines and much of East Asia in imposing its military will. We note the inner link between military attack and atrocities, the latter are necessary to make military domination accepted and routine. Atrocities establish the dominance of fear, just as the crucifixion did in the Roman empire. This Japanese wickedness also generated its own reprisal in defeat and suffering as the Allies fought, bombed and then occupied Japan. Again, the aggressor became the one who suffered defeat.
So, too, Italy, led by the bombastic, vain Mussolini, had espoused frog-marching Fascism, driven by the false ambition of winning a war and colonies in a pathetic echo of the Roman Empire. It, too, was defeated twice. First, it was overrun by the German Army unhappy with the Allied advance through Italy, and then it was defeated by the Allies. There were Fascist tendencies in many other countries, and the evils of control and kill were practiced by many of them. Thus, those who took the sword, perished by it. The destroyers were destroyed. In this deep sense, aggression was defeated world-wide, in this, we hope, greatest of all wars.
Yet, evil does not have simple boundaries. The Allies were drawn into, or were already inhabiting, their own evils. The history of Soviet Socialism was tortured. It had faced the Civil War within and after the Great War, with support for the Whites from Churchill and other western states. The birth of the USSR was bathed in blood and it continued with famine and purges, and a fear of foreign sabotage. Stalin, the steel one, had been undertaking internal purges against his supposed enemies which involved some 1.6 million deaths and he knew when Hitler came to power that the USSR would be attacked. The purged army suffered as the Nazis moved east occupying much of Russia. Gradually they were pushed back, but the Soviet march to Berlin was marked by retaliatory killings, rape and a reign of terror against the Poles and Germans. Stalin was totalitarian, evil, ruthless and facing a totally devasted state across a vast area. No-one in the West really understood the horror of the Soviet WW2 devastation; but the victors practised evil against Poles and Germans as they advanced to victory too.
The British also had their revenges and colonialisms, including the treatment of famine victims in Bengal. They were happy with revenge bombings to flatten German cities and Churchill was playing Roosevelt and Stalin to his own interests. Americans were handy with the pay-back gun and the nuclear bomb. When you fight a war, you are corrupted by it. Revenge, gratuitous fear and total war devoid of humanity become the order of the day. The good guys bombed Dresden and also killed to make those suffer by whom they had suffered. Evil destroys and then destroys again, if it is not stopped. At the same time, on all sides there were those who honoured people, fought lawfully and did their best for their enemies. Many, too, were trapped in the war by coercion, through fear for their loved ones and by where they were living. Others, through false propaganda, ideology, youth and ignorance became part of that which they did not understand. No-one really knows how long recovery from evil really takes.
One form of western evil was the Atomic Bomb development, the Manhattan project. Its scale was amazing, a project involving 130,000 workers and costing at least $2 billion in wartime dollars; it was a major new industry in formation led by Du Pont, Raytheon and other munitions companies, but directed by the United States’ Government. The bomb would vaporize tens of thousands of people, rip the flesh off tens of thousands more and kill others by radiation death. The actual accounts of those who suffered the attack are of an obscene destruction of friends, schoolmates, parents and colleagues in a city that was largely obliterated. The bomb was planned for the Germans or the Japanese. It was the necessary evil that would end the War. “Necessary Evil” was the name of the B-29 Super-Fortress plane used in the Hiroshima attack. When that kind of killing is a necessary evil, how far down the road to hell have we come? The complexity of violent evil, its virulence, should stop us all dead in our steps, so as not to allow it to weed the world.
There was another great dynamic of evil. Trauma carries evil across relationships and through generations. As the Nazis pushed east into Poland, the Ukraine and Russia they committed unmentionable atrocities. The suffering of the USSR during the Nazi invasion in terms of hunger, cold, destruction and death is unimaginable. There was also effectively genocide of many people in the region, so that German populations could move east and settle there. Then the tide moved the other way and the Soviets swept back with their own pattern of revenge. Rape as a weapon of war and direct physical attack were wanton during this period leaving the whole region raw with inhumanity. Poland lost 17% of its pre-War population, the highest of any nation involved, and perhaps 38% of the remaining population suffered PTSD in one form or another.[i] No-one can understand Poland who does not dwell with the suffering of that great nation.
Evil, if it is to die, needs the long healing of receding suffering, love, patience, empathy, carrying burdens, forgiveness and non-retaliation, and for many communities this was the abiding task from 1945 onwards along with physical recovery. There was the hope that the next generation, my generation, would be different. But would the defeat of the Nazis be the victory of peace?
The End of the European War – 1945.
The War rushed towards a close. In January, 1945 in the East the Soviet army pressed through Poland and Hungary towards Berlin and liberated Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. The western Allied forces fought the last “Battle of the Bulge” in Belgium sending the German Army in retreat, this time without any resources. Hitler, whose mind was really dominated by losing the First World War, must have frozen on the fact that he had also lost the Second; his life hope was in tatters and the German people had let him down. The pathetic egomaniac was done. In the Far East the Americans were freeing Manila and the Philippines. On the 4th February, 1945 Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Yalta in the Crimea to plan what should be done in Germany, Poland, the Far East, and by setting up the United Nations after the War, a justly famous meeting. Roosevelt’s journey there was heroic, because he was weeks away from death. In February, the push through the Rhineland began. The Allies moved through northern Italy Dresden and other cities were bombed, and fierce fighting took place as American forces pushed north and east. In March Allied forces crossed the Rhine, a Communist Romanian Government was established, and Soviet troops moved into Austria. On March 5th The Nazis started calling up 15 and 16 year olds. German subs sank daily. On the 22nd March the largely undefended final push from the West over the whole front above and below the Rhine into Germany took place. Hitler was now ignored. The European War was closing and the Nazis were ratting off to save their skins. In April US forces captured Okinawa, the island on the way to Japan. The Axis powers were imploding and the worst war in history would end.
Then, on 12th April, 1945 President Roosevelt, the linchpin of the western fight against Fascism, died. The wheelchair President, the handicapped one, the thinking Christian politician, had had a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt probably knew it was coming and was calm. Graham Jackson, a Negro who had played his accordion many times for F.D.R., stood with tears streaming down his face, and played one of the President’s favourite hymns, “Nearer, my God, to Thee” one more time, and it was sure true now.[ii] It was a great job nearly done by one of the greatest statesmen of all who had fought Fascism at home and abroad.[iii] He was succeeded by Harry Truman, a short, no nonsense, small town untried man, three weeks before the war would end. It should have been Henry Wallace who, like Roosevelt, was a world statesman, but he had been removed from the Vice Presidency by the right-wing cabal in the Federal Government who were disturbed by Wallace’s attacks on capitalism. Truman would end the War.
Hitler, now a rabbit in a hole, committed suicide in Berlin on the 30th April, ending the thousand-year Reich nine hundred and eighty six years prematurely to the relief of everyone. Adolf was also not good at prediction. The great USSR push from the east met the American and British push from the West, and unconditional surrender took place a week or so later among delirious celebrations in Moscow, Washington and around the world. Victory in Europe, or VE Day, was on the 9th May, 1945 after nearly six years of European war. The humble George VI and Churchill, who, at this stage of his life, could write history in a million words or with two fingers, V-signed victory from Buckingham Palace, and people danced knowing that the War was over. The celebrations were heart-felt, and widespread, as the world recognized that this victory was a great good for humankind, and they also took relief from the end to a killing and destruction unequalled in human history, for some 85 million people had died through war and a similar number been injured.
The Fight for Peace: The Insight of Paul.
Victory was ambivalent in another deeper way. The end of the war was a victory in war, but it was not necessarily a victory over war, a victory for peace. We can see this insight if we look at a two thousand year old Christian argument, one of the keys for this whole book. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians in its conclusion contains a description of the armour of God. It is often treated only as great Christian rhetoric, signalling the place of salvation, righteousness, faith, truth, peace and the Spirit of God in the life of the Christian. Though this is centrally true, it ignores the obvious Pauline intent in using this metaphor. Paul deliberately replaces the powerful kit of the average Roman soldier – helmet, sword, breastplate and shield with mere spiritual qualities of life. He uses the Roman method of fighting, standing in tight formation, to emphasize the Christian fight, but to fight against what? The passage is a deliberate demilitarization, a replacement of weapons, an insistence on a different way of doing things. Paul requires the understanding that “we do not fight against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers”. To his hearers and to us his words are really quite strange, because the Romans fought against people, as did all the millions of combatants in the Second World War. Of course, you fight against people. The point of armour and weapons is to fight other soldiers without being killed yourself. It is so obvious we do not usually even think about it. Yet Paul requires us to. He is requiring us to fight wearing the armour of God, but what is he fighting? Paul insists on not fighting against people and makes sure that the fight is not to be so construed. Christianity is not a fight against flesh and blood, but a fight against fighting; we love our enemies and see beyond the agenda of conflict. In every situation where we might resort to conflict against people, against flesh and blood, there is a longer view, an outlook which puts people on the same side, not in conflict, but in amity. Christianity breaks down the dividing wall of hostility.
The phrase, “principalities and powers”, has been much studied and commented on. It has an obvious general connotation of systems standing against God and the ways of God. But the theme of the whole passage seems to make it abundantly clear Paul is talking about the armour of God in part defeating the armour principle, the militarism, of the Roman soldier. Rome was, of course, the dominant power, the principality of the era for hundreds of years and its guiding principle was militarism, the relentless sword and shield which crushed all before it. The Caesars, the conquerors, were their god. Paul’s statement of what we are fighting against is by no means limited to militarism, but it is quite focused on militarism. Paul is out to replace Roman armour as we would say, quite aptly, lock, stock and barrel. He is looking to the God of peace. We do not fight against flesh and blood, but we do fight against the principalities and powers which would intimidate and cower people into submission by the sword. The fight is not one of aggressor against others, but a principial one. Having our feet shod with the Gospel of Peace is to go in a different direction which is the true one for humankind. Crucial, as in the teaching of Christ, is not giving way to fear of those who would intimidate and kill. And so, in our long history, this war against fighting did go on beyond headline facts like Christians being thrown to lions and retreating to the catacombs. Roman militarism decomposed and its power lost sway. Over time the British Isles faced “Unrule Britannia” as Christianity came in peace, with missionaries, to Iona, Lindisfarne, the flat estuary of Bradwell on Sea and other places, but later the British then followed Rome rather than Paul and started hacking out an empire and singing crude patriotic songs.
All of this is by way of addressing what was happening at the end of the Second World War. There was an understandable sense that the Allies had been fighting against the Nazis, the Japanese, and the full Axis powers and had defeated them. It was good winning against evil. They were fighting against flesh and blood and had achieved victory. We won the War. But this victory was not the Pauline victory against the principalities and powers of militarism and other such evils. Indeed, because weapons, armies and air forces had grown so much during the War into the world’s greatest industry, the deconstruction of militarism had become more difficult as so many were caught within it as their normal working pattern. Millions of soldiers happily went back to civvy street, but many did not, and militarism east and west was not going to disappear so easily. Not many saw the problem with Pauline clarity. Fighting the battle for peace and against the powers of militarism required a certain kind of insight and the new set of weapons that Paul so carefully describes. But 1945 was the best of all times to do it, and nobody, absent Roosevelt, was in place to do it. Let us dwell on the kit of peace for a while.
There is the belt of truth, the truth that Jesus claimed when before Pilate as the basis of power in the kingdom of God in contrast to Pilate’s military power. Can truth be more important and powerful than weapons? Well, Yes. The truth is that war does not work, that fear is not a good way to run states and that killing people is wrong. Truthfulness before God is the foundation of all good politics. Yet, propaganda and the construction of false understanding had spread through Goebbels, had been radioed to populations, and was now loosed on the world as a systematic direction of thinking. Those who wanted to compel people to think their way were trained up. So, the victory over Propaganda was won, but also lost. We are to buckle on the breastplate of righteousness, or right, law-abiding and just living. Can that be the basis on which society functions rather than fear of the sword? Well, Yes. It is far more efficient. Indeed, no society can function without its law-abiding people. It gives the best state that has ever been devised. Law-abiding democracy was entering its golden era, but still the swords would proliferate. We can wear the Good News of Peace on our feet, bringing peace wherever we go, rather than war. Christians took off on missionary journeys rather than patterns of conquest. The great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 was nearly successful for peace, and meeting on the road and shaking hands is a great way to live. We can have immigrants and emigrants, holiday visitors and hotels, rather than conquering armies. Invade France or have a holiday in Paris? Take your pick. So, we fight the soft fight for peace. But it did not really win in 1945. Within months we were into the Cold War. And we take up the shield of faith. When tension, quarrels, misunderstanding and opposition occur we can see through to resolution and concord and even to the Lamb on the throne, the Christian vision of where history will go. The Lamb on the Throne? The slain one was not defeated. There were to be wars and rumors of wars, and plagues, but also the healing of the nations. So, we have faith in the Lamb on the throne and little bits of faith for peace in our daily lives to build and not break down. Faith can move mountains. Then, deep cutting under the whole conception of conflict lies the Christian understanding of salvation – the helmet of salvation. With war, evil is always on the other side, and we construct the self-righteousness which justifies hatred and violence, but when we all wear on our heads the knowledge of our sin, our need of forgiveness before God and its gift to undeserved grace to us, the confession of our faults and the peace with God which banishes hostility, then wars will cease and nation will speak peace unto nation. So, there is another way, another kit for fighting fighting, and it is quite ordinary and cheap. As millions of soldiers left the battlefields and went home to cups of tea and precipitating a baby boom, they knew something of it, but its Christian fullness was not told and many did not dwell with the Spirit of God and pray the prayers of peace which would bring about the full healing of the nations. Blessed are the peacemakers, said Christ. We have to make peace. And there was opposition, stubbornness, the arms industry, the militarists, the secret service people and they did their thing and knew how to be in the right position. They were dressed in militarism. Nor was the War fully over. There was a civil war in China, trouble in Vietnam, the early shivers of the Cold War. Calculations about weapons carried on dominating world politics. The Pauline lesson was unlearned; the full fight for peace did not take place. We still need a World War For Peace fought with these weapons, and we are going to have it. But in 1945 War was not defeated.
The “Super-powers”?
So, the world hung at the end of a cataclysmic conflict looking where it should go. We, knowing the actual path it took, often presume that it would be like this, but perhaps it need not so have been. Indeed, it was stacked the other way. At the end of the Second World War there were two world “superpowers” – the USSR and the US. Really there was only one. The GDP of the American Economy was four times the size of the USSR and it had increased by 184% between 1938 and 1945. The other economies were UK 115%, France 54%, USSR 96%, Germany 88%, Italy 65% and Japan 85% of the 1938 figure. But the US and UK were the dominant military powers. Neither Stalin or Roosevelt had any real interest in external military aggression. The Nazis by attacking the USSR and Japan by attacking the US at Pearl Harbour set up their involvement in the War. Both these great states were reluctant fighters. Indeed, Hoover, Roosevelt and the Soviets were avid for peace and disarmament at the Geneva Conference in 1932. Thus, the major allies had arrived as superpowers without immediate rancour against one another. Both countries armed against a known and obvious aggressor when they had to rather than initiating their own militarization.
The further irony was that neither the USSR nor the United States had any need for aggression or military conquest on several major counts. Both powers had vast tracts of space which could be taken up by immigrants or expanded populations; they of all countries were not looking for more living room or conquest of territory. Second, they both had mineral and agricultural resources beyond what they could exploit already on their own domain, and development of these was the priority, unlike little Britain, or Belgium. Third, they were both preoccupied with internal economic reformation – the United States since Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932 and the Soviet Union through the Five Year Plans. In addition, the USSR, the nation that suffered on a vast scale the devastation of war, had to rebuild with desperately reduced resources and manpower. It was a nation on its knees. Finally, both were seen as invincible after the Second World War and the victories each had achieved in that War meant they were unassailable for decades. The aggressors Germany and Japan had been more thoroughly defeated and had internalized that defeat more thoroughly than in 1918; for them war was unthinkable. The USA and USSR had no conceivable rivals on the planet and were separated by thousands of miles from each other. For all these reasons in 1945 they had no need of weapons or armies and could relax from militarism for the forseeable future. Indeed, as we shall shortly see, they nearly decimated their forces and proceeded on this path of domestic reconstruction. The only hope for militarism was that they could be pitted against one another.
Yet, the USSR and the USA had become vast military states. But even if you walk backwards into being a superpower, the direction of your walk is towards militarism, and the word “superpower” had arrived. William Fox wrote a book, The Superpowers: The United States, Britain and the Soviet Union — Their Responsibility for Peace. It was written in 1944, coining the word and identifying the problem in the title. Britain did not really count; there were the two. How can superpowers, based on military might, be responsible for peace? The philosophy of Nietzsche with its emphasis on power as the formative drive in human history had inhabited Fascism, especially in Germany. Yet, those who fought Fascism were now also used to thinking in terms of divisions, hundreds of bombers, tanks, guns and deaths. Fascism had been, and would continue to be, part of the philosophy of the West. We believed in freedom and democracy, whatever they meant, but power, military power, was still in the driving seat. The calculus of military power had been practised by thousands of leaders in outcomes across the globe and they could not easily forget their modus operandi. They were trained in and used to military power as the currency of human affairs, and it was going to be difficult for them to stop the old ways. So, the world sleep-walked towards the idea of the “Superpowers” without much thought about what that move entailed and perpetuated the vast manufacturing military machines the greatest war of all had constructed. Military might trundled on, even when billions of dollars of military equipment was becoming useless, because it was not decisively faced and a few powerful people had a vested interest in it. We shall look at the detailed history, but always this was the underlying failure in the narrative. Though the argument for disarmament, untried in 1932, was as strong, and even stronger, militaries around the world, and especially in the States, had a vested interest in all the aspects of their trade – weapons, war, domination, rivalry, threats and the military establishment – and especially in the US it came to be in control, not automatically, but because the power brokers did their work.
[i] Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2018; 9(1): 1423831
[ii] http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/fdrdeath.htm
[iii] See War or Peace? Ch. 21 especially.