Bulwark America and National Security Fears: Why World War II was Fun

"Are you stupid?"

"Don't you know our history?"

Those were some of the actual phrases in emails from my German friends when America started off on its latest overseas adventures. More specifically, when American political and social structures - especially those supporting rights and freedoms - began to be suppressed in response to national fear. The Germans, who have time and again faced the details of their own history, are truly confused as to why we - supposedly the greatest democracy on the planet - do not know that history and why it is so deeply important to really know it.

Stupid? Well, no more than most of the rest of the human race.

Crazy? Again, we can all cringe into the same mirror.

(Apologist? As an American, I'm as ready to cry off criticism as the rest of the human race.)

But stubbornly refusing to examine an actual history, because we're more comfortable with the manipulated version we've been fed all our lives?

Guilty as charged.

In fact, the history of Germany's government from 1933 to 1945 has not even been scratched, certainly not in the American mind. We've seen the end product. We've never really examined the step-by-step process by which these ends came to be. The most important national history of the most horrific conflict of the 20^th century has been pushed away, partly because no one in America is actually allowed to -or wants to -- address the questions except from a viewpoint established during WWII itself.

We've been taught from the time we could frustrate our mothers by asking every June 6, "What's D-Day again?" that no one but the Germans could have gone down that road. We confuse ourselves every time we view their past. The question comes up again and again: "how could a civilized people have done that?"

It's quite simple. For a civilized people, this is a normal development in their history.

Viewed in the context of western civilization, the Germans - to put it in the simplest terms - did what they're so good at: they took something to the logical extreme. In so many ways, they asked, "If it's all right to invade, colonize, enslave and exterminate people of other races - why can't it be done to white people?"

Germany wanted a slice of the same colonial pie the Americans and their allies had enjoyed. Because they'd lost out in the colonial grabs in the new world and Africa, they just had to do it to their neighbors, and their neighbors were white.

Europe very quickly learned that this sort of behavior, when turned upon oneself, is just no fun. This is why, today, Americans are so upset when Europeans refuse to join coalitions. Europe has been there, done that. And they don't want any more of that pie.

America, on the other hand, has never had to swallow the same medicine. We think it's great fun to invade, without the invasion coming onto our own soil.

I overheard two elderly ladies, doing laundry in a laundromat several years ago, who giggled, "Oh, World War Two; if we had to, we'd have to admit it was just so much fun!"

After gasping over my own towels for a bit, I realized who they must have been during that war: happy high-school kids, dancing the swing and jitterbug with the Boys before those Boys were sent overseas. Maybe they helped out at the local USO. Perhaps they lost family members, and got to put a gold star in their window; years of nostalgic glow can polish even the deepest pain into part of A Great Crusade.

And here's the basis for the American blind spot:

America wasn't in World War Two. America sent troops overseas.

Those two old girls were never starved, or raped, or had to exchange their bodies to live at the end of a war their countries lost. They didn't survive city-wide intentional fire-bombings, or year-long sieges, or enforced - or hired -- prostitution. They didn't become any of the great wash of displaced women who were herded into camps until someone figured out which men they belonged to. They weren't used for general labor because they had no homes.

Is this this their blessing? Or our curse?

If we can never walk a mile in the moccasins of the people who have been invaded, if we can't see our loved ones mowed down by filthy cattle diseases brought by more immune conquerors, if we originate murderous racial theories because we can't bear the truth of where some of our own people came from, and how - what is to prevent us from ever just being another one of the speechless, unaware race of conquerors?

The Germans respected us for over a half century as the bulwark of democracy. They really thought it could Never Happen There. Because we wouldn't learn their lessons, they don't respect us any more.

Is it because we're less a bulwark every day - and more of a Fortress?