Varieties of Historical Revisionism

Nazi apologists give an important process a bad name

When I applied to college, before the days of the common application, I remember applicants being required to write an essay on a topic chosen from a list provided by the college in question, with each college offering a different list. There was some overlap, but I still wound up writing half a dozen different essays. My favorite was for the University of Chicago, which offered the option of writing an essay speculating how the world would be different if a particular historical event turned out differently.

I wrote about a hypothetical world in which the American Constitution was never ratified. As a result, the United States never became the United States; we remained a confederation of sovereign states which, over time, ceased to be confederated at all, as the sectional interests that repeatedly threatened to pull the Union apart in the decades after 1789 had a much easier time ripping the loosely-woven garment of the Articles. What did that world look like? I imagined it looking more like a cross between Europe and Latin America. New England still became an industrial and naval power, but more on the scale of the Netherlands. The slave states of the South became natural allies of Britain, and instead of triggering an American Civil War slavery became the basis for repeated conflicts within the British Empire. Texas and California were still settled by English-speaking migrants, but were now established as new sovereign states with their own political cultures and a tendency to make war on their neighbors, including each other. And so forth.

I no longer have the essay, but from what I remember I emphasized the potential positives of such an alternate history, the ways in which North America could have been more vibrant and interesting, and more free in the classical sense of being actively self-governing, than it has been in our history. I didn’t emphasize the potential downsides: the loss of America as a model for other liberal revolutions in Europe and around the world; the toll multiple wars on the American continent would take on the people and the land; the failure to achieve the economies of scale possible in a continental empire, and the economic and social benefits thereof, including greater individual freedom; the possibility that instead of being classically self-governing, smaller sovereign states would come to be dominated by entrenched local oligarchies and meddling European empires; or the consequences of the absence of America as a new liberal hegemon to replace an overextended Britain in the 20th century.

No, if I remember right, I ignored all that, and preferred to focus on the sunny side of political breakup, something I still seem to have a penchant for. That predisposition probably says something about me, though I’m not sure what. But it shouldn’t disqualify my speculations up front. Thinking about alternate historical possibilities helps shed light on both the contingency and the consequences of history, which in turn helps inform our understanding of decisions we have to make in the present. When we engage in it, we’re inevitably going to be driven by our predispositions, but we should be able to engage in it anyway—and then afterward interrogate the ways in which we may have missed things because of those predispositions.

Nazis, though, will tend to screw up that process.

I am a longstanding critic of the Munich-ification of foreign policy discourse. Too many ideologically- and morally-oriented American foreign policy analysts and practitioners have taken what is actually a quite atypical figure in history—Adolf Hitler—and made him emblematic of all adversaries, taken a single moment in the process of dealing with that figure—the appeasement at Munich—and made it emblematic of all foreign policy decisions. The corollary to this balefully anti-historical attitude is Churchill-worship, which I’ve also been disinclined to engage in, which not denying the British PM’s real and important virtues. As I’ve said many times, Churchill was a stopped clock who at a crucial moment in history told better time than anyone else. He was the right man for that moment—but that’s not a reason in general to prefer stopped clocks to ones that are off by a few minutes or that regularly run slow.

As you might gather from the foregoing, I’m also open to some kinds of revisionist thinking about World War II. More people, for example, should understand that appeasement wasn’t just based on a misunderstanding of Hitler’s intentions or the nature of his regime, but also on a correct understanding of British weakness. Britain wasn’t prepared for war with Nazi Germany in 1939; it certainly wasn’t prepared for war in 1938, and Chamberlain knew it. Arguably, it could never have been truly prepared for war, not on its own. By the same token, more people should understand that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in substantial part out of a sense of desperation in the face of American sanctions, and that the Japanese navy in particular understood that they were making a long-odds bet on the Empire itself in so doing. For that matter, we should all understand that the so-called “Good War” itself is a product of postwar revisionism; at the time, Americans rightly thought the war was awful and mostly didn’t understand what we were fighting for. That’s the context behind Eisenhower’s trenchant remark, on the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp, the first to be liberated by American forces, that at least now Americans would understand what we were fighting against.

What might follow from these understandings, though? That depends a great deal on who you imagine yourself to be, and what you value. Should America have pressured Japan as it did, for example? Well, if we didn’t care what Japan did in China, and didn’t care how dominant it became in the western Pacific more generally, then maybe not—but if we didn’t want to accept those developments, then the lesson is that our pressure could well lead to war rather than a change in behavior. That’s an important lesson too, and a sobering one.

If you’re a nostalgist for the British Empire, similarly, you might reasonably wonder whether it was wise to offer a last-minute security guarantee to Poland, or whether Britain might not have been better off coming to terms with a German-dominated Europe. Any honest appraisal of that question, though, would have to reckon with the fact, understood by all British statesmen, that this would ultimately subordinate the British Empire to Nazi Germany, and that if Britain did not accept that subordination they would face a Germany far more capable than it already was of undermining the integrity of that Empire. It would also have to reckon with the fact that the Empire was starting to come apart before World War II, partly because it had gotten unsustainably expensive but primarily because of the burgeoning desires of the peoples under British rule. Even the application of Nazi methods wouldn’t have prevented India from achieving independence—something Churchill, for one, seems never to have grasped.

Given those realities, is it reasonable to say that Churchill “caused” World War II? Only in the sense that he correctly understood the threat Germany posed, and wanted to meet that threat to preserve British independence rather than accept Vichy terms.

Of course, World War II also effectively destroyed British independence, leaving it decisively subordinate to American domination. This, though, was Britain’s core dilemma, that by the 1930s it was clearly no longer financially, politically or demographically capable of sustaining its world-girdling position. The real question it faced, whether it recognized it or not (mostly not), was always who and what would take its place. And that decision could not be made at the time nor assessed retrospectively without considering the nature of the alternatives—without recourse to values. To say “Churchill caused World War II” is, ultimately, to say that it would have been better for Britain to be a subordinate power in a Nazi-dominated world rather than for Britain to be a subordinate power in an American-dominated world. That ought not to be a difficult choice—certainly not for Americans, but really not for anyone other than those who admire Nazi Germany.

What about the toll of war itself, though? As a Jew, I’m fully aware of just how terrible that toll was, and I do think it’s worth entertaining alternative historical possibilities on this front as well. I would love to imagine a world where the Holocaust never happened. But that imagination has to be done honestly.

Antisemitism was absolutely central to Nazi ideology from the very beginning. Anyone who says otherwise is simply lying, and I presume they are lying because antisemitism is similarly central to their world view as, for example, it clearly is for Tucker Carlson’s infamous recent guest. Moreover, Nazi Germany always thought of itself as engaged in a three-front war: against the British, against the Soviets, and against the Jews. Its war against Britain aimed to liberate Germany from the threat of British power, which ultimately meant subordinating Britain to Nazi Germany but did not require the conquest of the British Isles. Its war against the Soviet Union was fundamentally ideological: to destroy Communism, to acquire land for German colonists, and to reduce the Slavic peoples to a slave-like condition under German domination. Its war against the Jews was eliminationist from inception: the objective was to end any Jewish presence in Europe.

It doesn’t strike me as impossible that the Nazis could have accepted a modus vivendi with a British Empire that left Britain effectively subordinate and no longer a threat to them; that, after all, was the whole loaf that Hitler wanted on that front. Could they have accepted a modus vivendi on the other two fronts, though, effectively limiting Nazi war aims and accepting half a loaf? If so, then perhaps the Holocaust could have been prevented by preventing World War II.

Before answering that question, it’s important to recognize that those other two fronts were deeply intertwined. It’s not just that the Nazis delusionally treated Judaism and Bolshevism as largely interchangeable. As a practical matter, Nazi Germany could not have rendered Europe judenrein without invading and destroying the Soviet Union. And whether or not it was inevitable before Operation Barbarossa, the Holocaust was definitely inevitable afterwards—because the only practical way to rid that vast territory of its Jewish population was to murder them all. So even if you imagine that Hitler could have been satisfied with ruling the union of all the German peoples under one Reich, making it by far the most powerful state in Europe, expelling all Jews from its territory, and living surrounded by quisling fascist states in France, Italy and Poland with a quiescent Britain just off shore—and I do not accept that fantasy as plausible—to fantasize about a world in which Europe is dominated by Hitler and yet the Holocaust as we know it never happened is, by definition, to fantasize about a world where Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union never went to war.

Is that plausible? I don’t think so, but then I don’t think Hitler was capable of stopping ever; I think Churchill got the Nazi dictator right. But it’s not completely impossible to imagine. Ribbentrop favored an outright alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as did Mussolini, so one can fantasize about a version of Hitler who would have taken such an idea seriously rather than, as in our world, planning for war against Stalin even as the two dictators joined hands in carving up Poland. Yet, the kinds of people who fantasize about this kind of alternative history are almost always the kinds of people who wish that Hitler had gone to war with the Soviet Union, and wish that, without Britain or America to worry about, the Nazis would have won that war.

If these revisionists were dispassionately assessing history in search of a statesmanlike way to avoid the horrific carnage of World War II, they would be deeply invested in the question of whether Hitler and Stalin could have sustained a peace, and what they, as they role-play the leaders of Britain or America, could have done to bring such a peace about. Moreover, they would surely take the same attitude toward the Cold War and the possibility of World War III that they profess to take toward World War II. They wouldn’t be horrified by Yalta, for example, but would be glad that Roosevelt took Soviet interests seriously rather than start preparing for another world war before this one was even finished. Nor would they applaud the Berlin Airlift for burying the ghost of Munich, but would approve of George Kennan’s rapid turn against Cold War maximalism, as he feared provoking the Soviet Union with the threat of encirclement more than the threat of Communist expansion in Asia.

But these sorts of revisionists don’t say any of that. In the end, they are also moralists—just inverted moralists who see the Nazi cause as just. They want to imagine a world in which Hitler achieved his maximal aims, very much including the obliteration of the Jews, only meeting with less resistance along the way.

I suppose this is all kind of obvious. For me, and likely for most of my readers, it’s obvious that the Nazis were horrible; that World War II was a tragedy, not a blunder caused by people who couldn’t see how peace-loving Hitler really was; that the Holocaust was one of the worst crimes in history, not a potentially reasonable attempt to “solve” a Jewish “problem” that got out of hand. But to some large number of people these things aren’t obvious, and it seems clear to me that if it isn’t obvious to you, you aren’t going to be warned off by claims that if you listen to this or that argument you’re a bad person. Indeed, I strongly suspect that much of the appeal lies precisely in the desire to give the finger to people who say that sort of finger-wagging. Meanwhile, the finger-wagging can get in the way of us reasonable people in our quest to actually understand the past, notwithstanding our sensible revulsion at Nazism.

Nazi apologists are just trolls, and you shouldn’t feed the trolls. But we do need ways beyond moralism to convince other people not to listen to the trolls. I’m a liberal, so I’m pretty dedicated to the proposition that honest public reasoning—including taking some potentially-troubling historical counterfactuals seriously—is an important part of that process. Historical revisionism isn’t something to worry about as such because it might embolden Nazis. Rather, it’s yet another thing to worry about saving from the Nazis. And part of saving it is doing it right, which is to say doing it honestly, and thereby showing how they do it so utterly dishonestly, and wrong.