Читать книгу The History of the West. Through the Eyes of Bears and Balalaikas - - Страница 4

Absurd question. Everyone knows that the anti-Hitler coalition won the war, and Germany and Japan lost. This is well-known, and there are surrender acts from 1945 about it.

Alright. Let’s put the question differently. Who won and who lost as a result of the Second World War? And although these questions are equivalent, in the new formulation, the answer is not at all obvious. Especially if we look at it not from the standpoint of 1945, but from the height of what we know now.

And we know a lot. Firstly, calling the “anti-Hitler coalition” the winner of the war would be at least bold: at the time of the war’s end, the relations among the allies were in some cases worse than with the enemy. So much so that American General Patton seriously contemplated a march on Moscow, and the Soviet General Staff was developing a plan to capture Europe up to the Atlantic. And as soon as the smoke cleared, the former brothers in arms immediately clashed with each other – initially little by little in West Berlin2, then all.

The conflict in Korea3 and then practically everywhere else. The inevitability of this was understood even before the war; the alliance of very different political regimes was initially unstable and even to some extent unnatural, therefore it is impossible to consider it a collective victor. So, let’s see what the war brought to its main participants individually.

The Soviet Union bore the brunt of the losses. Two consecutive military catastrophes in the summer of 1941 and the summer of 1942, combined with the occupation of the most densely populated territories, the famine of 1946, and the colossal strain on the economy, led to the death of 15 to 20 percent of the country’s population4. This staggering figure is comparable only to Germany’s losses in the Thirty Years’ War and the destruction of indigenous civilizations by the conquistadors. In exchange for these sacrifices, the USSR… essentially remained as it was. It did not acquire significant territories, unless the Kuril Islands5 are considered as such. The “sphere of influence” in Eastern Europe turned out to be fragile and held together only by military force6. The satellite China eventually had a serious falling out with its “parent”7, outgrew it, and became an independent political force. In economic terms, the fragile pre-war prosperity could not be restored, even despite “trophy” German technologies and reparations, and the resources allocated for the country’s recovery quickly burned out in the fire of a new war – the Cold War. As a result, the Soviet person, the warrior-liberator and nominal victor, never became wealthy, happy, or prosperous. The war gave him nothing except deep moral satisfaction and equally deep moral wounds.

France was lucky. After the defeat in 19408 and the occupation in 1942, such a state might not have remained on the map at all. English and American politicians had little desire to restore it, and only the political genius of de Gaulle, who managed to convince Stalin of the necessity of a counterbalance to the Anglo-Saxon bloc and Churchill of the advisability of opposing socialist expansion, allowed the French not only to preserve the country but also to be counted among the victorious powers. The price for success was the loss of colonies, of which pre-war France had many, although to this day the former metropolis still has decisive influence over many of them. Overall, considering the scale of the tragedy, France can hardly be considered among the losers. But naturally, not among the winners either.

England… Forget about England. Now we know England as a small island nation that still needs to be found on the globe. It was not England that entered the war, but the British Empire, the largest country that ever existed, with dominions on all inhabited continents, entered the war far from being in its best shape and suffered more than enough. And although in the Battle of Britain, England itself was successfully defended, and the largest and most significant dominions – India, Canada, Australia – practically were not harmed, the fall of Singapore, the bombings of Darwin, and the German landing on Crete clearly showed that the metropolis was no longer capable of defending colonies around the world. And since the entire colonial system was based on providing protection in exchange for resources and markets, the post-war history of the British Empire turned out to be short, transforming the Victorian-era superpower into the remnant we now know. It seems that it is Britain that should be recognized as the state most affected by World War II.

The United States. Here, everything is the opposite. The war pulled the USA out of the Great Depression9 and not only pulled it out but also brought it directly into the status of a superpower. First, as one of two, and then as the only one. And although America had to feed and arm almost all of its allies10, and for some, even fight. If Hitler did not exist, the Americans would have had to invent him. To be fair, it must be acknowledged that the brilliant victory of the USA at that time was far from obvious and owed not so much to the military and politicians but to the incredible, beyond imaginable economic power, as well as the physicists of the Manhattan Project, whose results allowed for the rapid consolidation of success.

America should have been declared the only obvious winner or, if you prefer, the “beneficiary of the war” if not for the truly epic rise of China. Pre-war China was the ruins of an ancient civilization, trampled upon by three generations of Europeans. Endless civil war, Japanese occupation, and the status of an impoverished colony without its own statehood – that was China’s fate in the thirties. A striking contrast with nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, isn’t it? Of course, the transformation of Cinderella into a princess occurred exclusively thanks to massive Soviet investments, possibly the very ones that could have made the conditions of people in the USSR correspond to the status of victors. But if it weren’t for the war, there would not only have been no investments but not even a reason for them. So, China, on the whole, gained even more than the United States, although its contribution to the victory was undoubtedly much less.

And what about their opponents, who nominally lost and unconditionally surrendered?

Germany, at least the FRG, 10 years after surrender, became one of the largest and then unconditionally the largest economy in Europe. Subsequently, it became the undisputed leader of the European Union. At the cost of the death of 10% of the population (also a number that boggles the mind) and enormous national humiliation, the country gained new allies, a new development vector, and, in fact, achieved everything it sought. From both a political and economic point of view, in the perspective of decades, Germany is the winner in the war, not the loser.

The same can be said about Japan. However, for Japan, the renunciation of territorial claims in exchange for accelerated economic development turned out to be less favorable and not as long-term, and the lack of land, overpopulation, and isolationism still have an impact to this day. Considering the initial ambitions and the status of the unconditional leader of the Eastern Hemisphere acquired at the beginning of the 20th century and lost in 1945, Japan apparently still lost. Although not as much as it could have, which, oddly enough, was due to a relatively quick and relatively painless exit from the war, provoked by two atomic bombings. If the Japanese had to engage in banzai charges on Hokkaido, the result could have been much worse.

Perhaps it is impossible to do without at least a provocative but still quite illustrative detail. One of the main tragedies of the Second World War is the Holocaust. Genocides occurred both before and after, but none of them even come close to the destruction of six million people. But there is another side: the highly successful state of Israel owes its existence entirely to the war, and significantly to the Holocaust specifically. From the perspective of political history, European Jews, like the Chinese, should be considered as heavily, catastrophically affected – but ultimately victorious.

As we can see, the assessment of winners and losers not by the outcomes of battles but by the results of historical processes radically differs from the conventional view. But that’s about countries. How are things with humanity as a whole? After all, a world war is something that affects the entire collective of people and changes the essence of relationships between them, not only in relation to individual nations but overall.

From a universal human perspective, everything is quite ambiguous. The death of tens of millions of people in a short period, particularly in the most developed and civilized countries at that time, sharply increased the empirical value of life. Alongside the widespread adoption of hygiene and antibiotics11, which drastically reduced child mortality and mortality in general, society’s reflection on war and its consequences led to people valuing their lives incomparably higher than before, regardless of objective criteria of their own success, usefulness, and prospects. Throughout most of human history, life was valued based on the logic of an individual’s use to society: a young person was worth more than an old one unless the old person possessed some unique knowledge and skills, a man was more valuable than a woman, the healthy were more important than the sick, and a general or nobleman was incomparably more significant than a common soldier. This kind of “rational” interpretation persisted even in wartime: it was considered a valor for a soldier to shield a general from a bullet, but a general covering soldiers under fire would be considered at least an idiot.

Fascism, as a doctrine of innate inequality or rather the unequal value of people, made such an indelible impression on humanity that, in response, a whole new legal theory emerged – the doctrine of human rights12. Rights that stem not from any merits but from the very fact of existence, and even more strongly, the assertion of the equality of these rights regardless of what a particular person represents. This doctrine, with few exceptions, has become the norm in our time and, in turn, has generated a whole set of consequences, both positive and negative. Among the first is the rejection from large-scale wars and a general decrease in the role of force in resolving conflicts: let’s not forget that even by the beginning of the 20th century, war as a means of settling political problems was considered a quite acceptable tool. The role of various forms of discrimination has sharply decreased: being Black, Indian, homosexual, or a woman no longer means being permanently in a disadvantaged position. The number of social elevators has increased immeasurably, even in traditionally “right-wing” countries such as the USA and the UK, being born into a poor family without titles and status is no longer a lifelong sentence.

On the other hand, the dependence of individuals on the state has sharply increased and continues to grow. Ensuring even basic rights – and the interpretation of human rights is constantly expanding – requires significant expenditures from governments. If, in the pre-war period, a person, excluding the Soviet one, spent most of their earnings at their discretion, now tens of percent and sometimes the majority of the national product is distributed through taxes and state mechanisms. No business and even everyday life itself occurs without state participation and regulation, which, on the contrary, was not previously considered the norm. As a result, stability and guarantees of well-being have benefited, while prospects and opportunities for self-realization have suffered. And, of course, the entire pre-war organization of the world – in conditions of universal equality of rights, a colonial system based on the “white man’s burden”13 is fundamentally impossible.

Whether to consider the collapse of the colonial system as a good or an evil – everyone has their own answer to this question.