World War Two: Baddies And Goodies

My earlier article – Can
‘Good’ be the Greater Evil? – looked at the issue of
how wars should end, and how Good versus Evil framing of
international conflicts makes it difficult for participants
– especially those who are convinced they are the Good in
an epic battle against an Evil – to bring hostilities to
an end. This is especially pertinent if the side designated
‘Evil’ has a military advantage tantamount to
‘winning’.

World War Two

World War Two (WW2)
is the one war that just about everyone has heard of, and
which in the light of history is still understood in Good
versus Evil terms. As part of the mythologising of WW2, it
is commonly presented as a simple four-word trope: ‘Hitler
versus the Jews’. With Hitler being our historical byword
for Evil, that trope automatically casts ‘the Jews’ as Good.
Hence it is very confusing for many today when ‘the Jews’,
in the form of Israel, reveal themselves to being somewhat
less than angelic. And the great-grandparents and
grandparents of Israel’s present leaders were doing things
of questionable morality in Palestine before hardly anyone
in the anglosphere had ever heard of Hitler.

Here I
identify eight ‘personalities’ from World War Two, and
divide them into ‘Evil’ and ‘Good’.

For my baddies, I
make the obvious choices by including these fascist leaders:
Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), and Hitler (Germany); and
the totalitarian allegedly socialist leader of the Soviet
Union (Stalin).

For my goodies, I choose the four
‘victorious’ allied political leaders: Churchill (United
Kingdom), De Gaulle (France), Truman (United States), and
Chiang Kai Shek (China).

We’ll note that five
countries were the victors of WW2, and these countries
became the five permanent members of the Security Council of
the United Nations. The leaders of these victor nations are
one of our baddies (Stalin) and our four goodies. We need to
note that, at its core, WW2 was never a clash between
Germany and the United Kingdom, although it is true that in
one year, 1941, United Kingdom was the only active sovereign
opponent of Germany (and until December of that year that
year China was the only serious sovereign opponent of
Japan).

When we look at the core conflict of World War
Two, we see that it was about lebensraum – ‘living
space’ in Eastern Europe for Germany – and hence the core
conflict was the German Third Reich versus the Soviet Union.
Hence, the supreme winner of WW2 – the ‘Great Patriotic
War’ – was Stalin’s Soviet
Union.

Mussolini

Fascism
is an Italian word, and Mussolini was the prototype fascist.
Mussolini came to power in 1922 in a coup rather than
through an election. He effectively established a brutal
‘one-party-state’. In the 1930s he became renown as a North
African imperialist. In 1938 he formed a military axis with
Hitler’s Third Reich. He was deposed and killed in 1943,
having become a ‘puppet’ of Hitler. As baddies go, he was
pretty bad; although Hitler thought that he was
insufficiently anti-Jewish at a time when anti-Jewish
sentiment was widespread in Western Europe. After 21 years
of fascist power in Italy, eventually Good prevailed over
Evil.

Franco

Franco was Europe’s second
fascist dictator. He came to power in Spain by waging a
Civil War, from 1936 to 1939, against the elected
government. Franco had support from much of the old elite is
Spain, including the Catholic Church, and depended
militarily on soldiers from Morocco, under Spanish
control.

The Spanish Civil War has much in common with
the present Ukraine-Russian War, not least the fact that it
became a cause-celebre for the progressive politics of the
left in the liberal west. The International Brigades,
fighting against Franco, drew on many idealist young men
from places as far from Spain as New Zealand. Yet in the
end, as George Orwell documented in Homage to
Catalonia, the progressive government side defeated
itself, through factional in-fighting. Good wasn’t always
good. Further the fascists in Italy and Germany used Spain
as a military training ground, with atrocities that included
Hitler’s gratuitous carpet-bombing of Guernica in April
1937.

During and after the uncivil Spanish Civil War,
atrocities were committed on a massive scale, and many
progressive Spaniards had to flee for their lives to places
such as Mexico.

The Spanish War was won by Evil. And
Franco remained dictator of Spain until his death in
1975.

Yet progressive Spain did not die forever.
Indeed, Spain is arguably the most progressive country in
the European Union in 2024. As a 21-year-old I spent a few
days in Franco’s Spain, in 1974; I visited Barcellona,
Madrid, Granada and Seville, before going on to Portugal.
Certainly, the country was clearly poorer then than say
France or Netherlands, and there was an awareness of a
day-to-day military presence. But it was a country with good
people, much human potential, and welcoming to
tourists.

While Bad won the Spanish war, the long-run
outcome was not-at-all bad. Further, Spain, tired from
conflict, refused to join World War Two. As a neutral
country, access to Spain from Occupied France was crucial to
the eventual outcome of the western
WW2.

Hitler

We need say little more. He –
the face of Evil – lost the War in Europe. Good won, in
the West. But it is worth imagining how the war in the west
might have ended had events taken a different turn. Yet,
even if Hitler had become emperor of all Europe, the world
still would not have ended. And West Europe most likely
would have evolved – as did Spain – back to some form of
liberal democracy.

Stalin

The core war was not
in the west. While the Jewish question was an important and
sinister backgrounder to Hitler’s war, the main Nazi agenda
was to appropriate the Slavic lands, and indeed turn the
Slavs into effective slaves.

Stalin prevailed in this
most brutal of all wars; far more brutal than the war in the
West. But Stalin, in totalitarian power since 1924, had
already waged his own war against many of his own people.
The famine in Ukraine in the 1930s is a particular example.
In addition, the Zionist Jews who settled in Palestine in
the 1920s and 1930s were substantially refugees from Stalin.
Stalin arguably contributed more than Hitler to the problems
that Palestine faces today.

Stalin was an Evil, little
doubt about that; though as an ally of the West many
progressive westerners (including my parents) refused to see
this. So it is not true to say that the outcome of World War
Two was a victory of Good over Evil; far from it. And the
harm resulting from that war is far from over; as indicated
by the present war in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Eastern
Europe survives, and has had – and still has – many
hopeful moments. No nuclear weapons have as yet been used in
anger in Eastern Europe / Western Russia. Evil has had a
good run in that region, but as the Lesser Evil. There is
still hope.

The Four ‘Goodies’

In the years
1951 and 1952, four of the five named victors were heads of
state of the permanent members of the Security Council:
Stalin, Churchill, Truman and Chiang Kai Shek. (De Gaulle
did not become head of state in post-war France until
1958.)

How Good was Churchill? He made the decision in
1940 to keep United Kingdom in the war at a time when
Britain could have opted for Irish-style neutrality. And he
was not a party to some of the quite cynical decisions made
by the Conservative British Government in the late 1930s.
But he had been part of the problem in World War One,
including the architect of the Gallipoli campaign.

He
was also very much part of the conservative ‘old guard’; an
old imperial political elite which exacerbated the
Israel-Palestine problems through its cynical manoeuvres
against Egypt that created the 1956 Suez crisis. That was
when the first massacre of Khan Younis took place.

I
feel that, while Britain did end up on the winning side of
WW2, Churchill falls far short of the mantle of Good. Much
that is good in the liberal west happened despite Churchill
rather than because of him. And there’s much in the liberal
west that is not good.

What about Truman? He came to
power in the United States in 1945, just before the end of
WW2. But he had played an important war role in the United
States since 1941, through the ‘Truman Committee’. He saw
through the surrenders of both Germany and Japan. We know
enough about this ‘Good’ man that he resorted to nuclear
weapons to achieve the surrender of Japan, and to head off
Stalin who had entered the Pacific War after the surrender
of Germany in May 1945. Truman started the Cold War, which
was a nuclear war though in which nuclear weapons were not
fired subsequently in anger. The bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki should be understood as both ending WW2 and
starting the Cold War. We should be careful in casting
Truman as a Good in the battle against Evil.

De
Gaulle, like Churchill, was a strongman of the European
imperial world. His moment of inglory came in the 1960s,
with the colonial resistance to the decolonisation of
Algeria. This was one of the most brutal wars of
decolonisation, ever; only to be overshadowed by the Vietnam
War waged by Truman’s successors after an earlier phase
waged by De Gaulle’s predecessors.

Finally, Chiang Kai
Shek. Although listed here as Good, in many ways he was a
Franco-like figure, though operating in China on a larger
scale than Franco ever could in Spain. And, while militarily
defeating Japan, he lost the subsequent civil war in China.
Today’s legacy of his misdeeds is the China-Taiwan debacle
that threatens to set off a new global Pacific
War.

Conclusion

When the Baddies won, the
eventual outcomes weren’t always bad (though the immediate
outcomes were bad). And when the Goodies won, the eventual
outcomes weren’t necessarily good. Indeed, adverse
consequences today for the western lands of the former
Russian Empire have been a result of the twentieth century
misdeeds of both ‘Evil’ and ‘Good’. Warring political elites
are mischievous by their very nature. War itself is a
Greater Evil, especially when it becomes global in scope and
can bring about fatal consequences for combatants and
non-combatants alike. The ultimate ‘good’ is to act in ways
that help to pull the world back from existential
consequences. Peace, not Perfection, is the Greater
Good.

Spain is a peaceful nation state today; a
country which plays a constructive role in the European
Union; it is peaceful and progressive despite the last
victor of the last war in Spain having been undisputedly
‘Bad’.

————-

Keith Rankin (keith at
rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a
retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in
Auckland, New
Zealand.

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