Groucho Marxism

The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, recently created a diplomatic incident by questioning Russia and China’s contribution to winning WWII. This did not go down well with the Russians and Chinese, as you might imagine. But her claim is in accordance with the standard account of WWII we are taught in UK, which is basically that Britain won the war with a little help from the US. You only have to glance at the casualty statistics from WWII, however, to see how ludicrously ahistorical this account is. The Soviet Union suffered around 24 million deaths and China around 20 million deaths; in contrast, the UK and the US barely suffered a million deaths between them. Furthermore, whereas around 50% of Soviet deaths and 80% of Chinese deaths were civilians, less than 100,000 UK and US civilians were killed in total.

What if we look instead at deaths as a percentage of the pre-war population? Even by this metric, the Soviet Union and China are suffered far more than the UK and the US. The Soviet Union lost around 13% of it’s pre-war population and China lost around 4%, whereas the UK lost around 1% of its pre-war population and the US less than half a percent. By this metric there are countries that suffered even more than the Soviet Union: Lithuania lost around 14% of it’s pre-war population, and Poland around 18%. In fact Poland and other countries suffered more than the UK on both metrics. For example, Indonesia suffered around 4 million deaths, 6% of its pre-war population; and Yugoslavia suffered around 1 million deaths, also around 6% of its pre-war population.

At this point a critic (or Kaja Kallas) might argue that number of deaths is not the right metric to measure a country’s effectiveness in fighting a war. They might even argue that a high number of deaths signals that a country was particularly ineffective. So what if look instead at the number of casualties inflicted on the enemy? In the European theatre the Soviet Union once again comes out on top. The Germans lost around 4 million soldiers on the eastern front to the Soviet Union, and around 1 million on all other fronts combined. In the Pacific theatre things are not so clear-cut, but China’s contribution here should not be underestimated. The Japanese lost around half a million soldiers in China, around a quarter of its total military losses in the war.

However you choose to measure it, it is clear that the Soviet Union was the key force that defeated Nazi Germany. WWII is therefore best understood as a war between Germany and the Soviet Union for control of Eastern Europe. This is a dispute with roots going back many centuries. Eastern Europe was a patchwork of Germanic- and Slavic-speaking peoples for over a thousand years, with no one group being able to claim hegemony. With the rise of empires in the 1800s it was inevitable that there would be conflict over which group had a right to this land. This conflict came to a head in WWI but was not fully resolved until the end of WWII; and it when it was finally resolved, it was resolved decisively in the Soviet Union’s favour.

What about the war in the Pacific? Our critic might argue that this was a separate regional conflict and should not be considered as part of WWII. But if that’s the case then we cannot give the US any credit for ending WWII by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact we should not give the US any credit for these appalling crimes regardless of whether we consider them part of WWII. Many have argued that Japan was already defeated and seeking a way to surrender, and that the atomic bombs were not needed to achieve this outcome. It was certainly not necessary to bomb two densely populated cities. If the US really wanted to drop an atomic bomb they could have done so into the sea near Japan as a warning, then given Japan the opportunity to surrender (which surely it would have done).

It is clear that in the West, the UK and US are generally given far too much credit for winning WWII, and the Soviet Union and China far too little credit. The obvious explanation is the natural tendency we all have to big up our own achievements and downplay the achievements of others; but I think there is more to it than that. Recall that during WWII, both the Soviet Union and China were communist states. Giving them credit for winning the war would involve giving credit to communism for defeating fascism – and we can’t have that can we! Instead, liberal Western states felt compelled to take the credit themselves. The idea that liberalism defeated fascism in WWII is now ingrained in Western culture, as Kaja Kallas’ recent comments demonstrate. Unfortunately for the West, however, this idea is simply not supported by the facts.