For the last week, a corner of the internet has been watching a blogger flail over a deceptively simple — and one might think long-resolved — question: Was the United States justified in fighting World War II? The blogger is one Michael Tracey, a 34-year-old New Jerseyite who has carved out a sizable audience as a “contrarian leftist” (that is, a right-winger with plausible deniability), thanks to frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson and promotion by his patron, Glenn Greenwald.

The question that’s flummoxing the guy isn’t really a historical one at all. Like many of his comrades, Tracey moved seamlessly from half a decade of anti-anti-Trumpism and anti-anti-fascism to a faux-principled anti-anti-Putinism: a conviction that nothing should be done by anyone to halt or even slow Russia’s annexation and decapitation of Ukraine. And because it seems neither side can go a day without invoking the European theater of the Second World War in reference to the current conflict, it was all but inevitable that someone would ask Tracey if his “antiwar” stance would have extended to the fight against the Nazis.

Perhaps equally inevitably, it was a question the blogger has proved completely incapable of answering, or perhaps even understanding. Instead, Tracey devolved into a weeklong series of increasingly more ludicrous takes, including condemning people for somehow unfairly associating the 1940s America First Committee with the antisemitism of Charles Lindbergh (Lindbergh was the group’s spokesman) and questioning the justification of D-Day. Things really reached rock bottom when he cited, and implicitly endorsed, Adolf Hitler’s self-justification for the Holocaust. (More on all of that below.)

But just because Tracey has nothing interesting or insightful to say about the conflicts, past or present, doesn’t mean we can’t use his self-humiliation as a springboard to think through that question — and what it implies — for ourselves. Because, as I signaled above, the question of how to think about World War II is not as straightforward as it might seem at first, even if, in the end, the obvious answer ends up being the correct one.

But first, a programming note: This ended up being a long post, so I’m dividing it in two. The first half is below. The second will be out tomorrow, as my regular subscriber-only Friday edition. To make sure you don’t miss it, sign up here:

So, it helps first to ask why we talk so much about the Second World War at all. The war ended 77 years ago, after all — when the current U.S. president was two years old, and before any of his four predecessors, or Vladimir Putin, were even born. The United States has been at war pretty much constantly since that conflict ended. Contrary to the popular image of prewar American “isolationism,” it had been at war almost as constantly in the decades before it as well. (More on that here; forgive the obligatory book plug.)

Part of the reason the big war in the middle stands out was of course its size. Operations took place on every continent, including Antarctica, and every ocean. It was also its foundational nature, in combination with the First World War that preceded it — as Tony Judt wrote in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, everything in the 20th century was “back-shadowed by the thirty-year war that began in 1914, when the European continent embarked upon its descent into catastrophe.” (It’s telling in itself that Judt didn’t even have to specify the war referenced in the title.) Eurocentrism helps explain part of the obsession: there’s no history white people, especially white men, love reading or talking about more than the history of white people fighting each other. But World War II remade everything, everywhere: from sparking decolonizing struggles across Asia and Africa, to the creation of the United Nations and the rest of the U.S.-influenced world order.

Yet that still doesn’t quite explain it. There are other global events (like the 1918-1920 global flu pandemic) and far more recent wars that don’t almost universally rush to mind. The biggest reason that Americans — and Russians, for that matter — love talking nonstop about World War II, and specifically the European theater, is simple: We were undoubtedly the good guys. As Elizabeth D. Samet wrote in her recent book — named, appropriately, Looking for the Good War: “World War II was in crucial ways an exceptional war: a struggle against the unremitting brutality of totalitarianism, albeit one that America joined late, and only in response to direct attack.”

Indeed, the Allies in general and the Americans in particular did a lot of horrible things over the course of that war. Samet lays out just a few: the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More damningly, and contradicting the post-hoc “memory” that the United States fought the war primarily to prevent or stop the Holocaust, she records the laissez-faire attitude toward the genocide taken by the U.S. government and military; a crime of omission detailed in the Treasury Department’s January 1944 “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” which President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to by even more belatedly creating the War Refugee Board. (The many, many ways in which U.S. inaction and institutional antisemitism helped doom Europe’s Jews is being ably covered this week in a new Ken Burns documentary on PBS.)

Yet, the (perhaps calculated) moral cowardice of the Michael Traceys of the world notwithstanding, there is a universe of difference between failing to stop an atrocity and committing that atrocity. Even while, yes, committing lesser atrocities yourself.1

Further, and contrary to Tracey’s claims, the U.S. was not responsible for causing or even “accelerating” the Holocaust, as even the scholars whose work he cherry-picked attest. In the above-linked thread, Tracey cites Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich at War, which indeed lays out how the expansion and implementation of the Final Solution occurred in tandem with growing U.S. materiel support for the British and then the Soviet Union in 1941, through the Lend-Lease program.

But it seems Tracey didn’t read the rest of the chapter. A few pages earlier, Evans states:

As soon as the German forces had entered the Soviet Union and the various territories it controlled, followed by the four SS Security Service Task Forces and subordinate Task Units including a number of police battalions, they had begun to carry out the orders Heydrich had given them to kill civilian resisters, Communist Party officials and Jews, along with all Jewish prisoners of war, in order, as they thought, to eliminate any possibility of resistance or subversion from “Jewish Bolsheviks.”

This is key, because the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was a) Hitler’s choice alone and b) came before any U.S. materiel was given to the Soviets — because, of course, the Soviets and the Nazis had been allies right up until the first German troops plunged across the border on June 22, 1941. In other words, the Nazi high command had made the decision to start the mass murder of Jews on its own, independent of any actions taken in Washington or elsewhere.

Second, Evans makes clear that it was not Hitler’s paranoia about the “growing involvement of America in the war” for its own sake that spurred the expansion of the mass murder “on a European scale.” Rather, Evans writes:

Overriding all other possible motives in Hitler's mind was that of security: in his memory of 1918, the Jews had stabbed Germany in the back, and ever since he had come to power he had been attempting by increasingly radical means to prevent this from occurring by driving them out of the country.

In other words, the “threat” as Hitler perceived it was not from the United States but from ordinary Jewish men, women, and children, whom he was convinced were somehow orchestrating a secret alliance between Roosevelt, Churchill, and (his erstwhile ally) Stalin.2 If as early as late July — barely a month into the Nazi invasion of the USSR, and over two months before the first official U.S.-Soviet Lend-Lease protocol would be signed — Hitler, as Evans recounts, had already tasked Reinhard Heydrich with “making all necessary preparations for … a total solution to the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe,” then what could Roosevelt (or anyone else) have possibly done to dissuade him?3

It may be debatably true, as Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman write in their new book, Hitler’s American Gamble, that until Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11 of that year, he had “explicitly held European Jewry hostage to secure the good behavior of the Americans.” (The authors later clarify that, given the Nazi murder of at least one million Jews in Soviet and previously Soviet-held lands between June and December, they are referring specifically to Western and Central European Jews.) But if so, again, what were the consequences of U.S. support to the British and eventually Soviet war efforts? And what was the alternative? The vast majority of Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe; nearly half were from Poland alone. By what means does Tracey think the Jews of those countries would have been better off had the U.S. not bolstered the Soviet defense?

And then, keep in mind that it was Hitler who declared war on the U.S., not the other way around. The hostage-taker, as it were, just started shooting. Nor was it inevitable that he would do so: throughout the week after Pearl Harbor, as Simms and Laderman recount, it remained an open question to everyone outside of Berlin if Hitler would let the Japanese keep the Americans occupied in the Pacific (and in doing so cut off their aid to the British and Soviets), goad the Americans into starting a direct war by unleashing attacks on the Atlantic fleet, or do what he did and just declare war himself. That’s why the authors call it a gamble. Hitler had agency, and he used it to bring about his own destruction — though not before he took millions of innocent lives with him. There is a reason that the canard that the Nazis were forced to perpetrate the Final Solution as some form of self-defense is considered a core form of Holocaust denial.

Click here for Part 2

Leave a comment

Edited by Tommy Craggs