Western institutions are weaponizing the memory of the Second World War to fit current geopolitical aims, distorting history and creating moral, democratic and strategic blind spots.
"From Moscow’s perspective, the Pact with Germany followed the exhaustion of diplomatic alternatives with London, Paris and Warsaw, not ideological convergence with Nazism."
Ask anybody in your life if they have ever heard of Maxim Litvinov and "Collective Security" against Nazis. Answer will probably be close to 100% "No". Jabara's work is nicely trashing the myth of poor little Poland.
The problem with history studies, at least back home, is that there are no decent jobs. People are encouraged to do IT, whereas elites are handling the historical memory. Now, who are these elites at the EU level that are dictating the narrative? People like VdL, Merz, Baerbock, Kallas, Landsbergis and similar characters back home. Revisionist Nazi and quisling posterity.
Before Putin elevated local event of "Immortal Regiment" to the national level and before it went globally, our lot was gloating how soon WWII veterans would all be gone. "Immortal Regiment" preempted this, luckily.
All Western leaders have become quislings. Their selectively applied "multi-culturalism" in practice has been corrupted to a facade, parroting the amorphous elites who created the quislings and falsified by their every cultural action. It seems the Cold War efforts to destroy European culture (arts, music, etc) is insufficient.
The net result will be that the quislings will complete the destruction of Western Europe, beyond fragmented and impoverished nationalist resistance - even if the EU collapses, it may be too late. Ironically, this quisling success arguably may result in cultural domination by the last European civilizational values left standing: those of the Third Rome, sometimes known as Muscovy. This would be comical, were it not also tragic. Fortunately, the best of the Enlightenment values spread to the east before their abandonment in the west.
Wonderful take on an essential topic. And although it raises so many important points, one could still add many others: the elevation of the ‘holodomor’ narrative to the status of a European civic religion, the painting of Russia as the worst colonial power in history … most of it has been around for a long time, but the most blatant distortions have never been trumpeted as shamelessly as now.
Still, I slightly object to your idea this is widely the consequence of a decline of historical knowledge (although it is undeniable that standards both in academic and popular knowledge are rapidly eroding). It is a conscious reinvention of history - not only in the service of foreign policy, but of a deeper ideological agenda. That's at least how it looks from a German perspective - no doubt most Germans always wanted to imagine themselves as victims of the eastern barbarians, but it was long deemed unacceptable to voice it too openly. I am nevertheless shocked by how enthusiastically all these guardrails have been torn down over the last ten years. Historians specialized in Eastern Europe are marching at the forefront - so it's not just ignorance (their professional identity was always primarily about producing anti-soviet propaganda). But it goes beyond that - I can assure that regular Germans love to blubber "Russia is a fascist state" with all signs of relief - the relief of a violent criminal who can openly blame his victim for his atrocities and get acclaim for it.
Thank you for this thoughtful and candid reflection. You are absolutely right to push back on the idea that this is only about declining historical knowledge. There is clearly something more intentional happening. In many cases it does feel less like confusion and more like deliberate reinvention where history is being consciously reordered to serve present ideological and geopolitical needs. That’s an important distinction, and I agree it deserves emphasis.
Your reflections from a German perspective are especially valuable. The emotional dimension you describe, especially the sense of moral release that comes from projecting fascism outward, is something I think many observers sense but rarely articulate. The tearing down of former guardrails over the past decade has been striking and not confined to one country. What was once considered rhetorically unacceptable now circulates freely, often with institutional backing.
At the same time, I try to hold two things together - yes, there is conscious reframing underway, but it is also enabled by a public sphere that has lost much of its historical depth and resilience. Intent and erosion reinforce one another.
I’m very glad you added these layers to the discussion. If you’re interested, I’ll be exploring the Holodomor narrative, memory politics in Germany and the ideological drivers behind this shift in more detail in future essays. Your perspectives will enrich those discussions.
Thanks for the kind reply. As I said, I am perfectly ok with your main points, especially emphasizing that we are witnessing a top-down implementation of historical narratives, amplified by intellectual impoverishment - "intent and erosion reinforce one another" captures it perfectly. Just as the depletion of language and the growing audacity of propaganda are intertwined.
German memory politics in respect to Russia/SU is particular of course, although I am more and more inclined to think the British have a similarly psychotic relation (but maybe it's just an elites thing). However, the ground for the new narrative was already prepared in all of the West by the dogma of totalitarianism, Natostan's ideological cornerstone.
It's amazing to see how much historical revisionism has crept into some corners of scholarship. The most blatant is Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. In the course of 800+ pages, he argues that Stalin deliberately provoked and manipulated events to spark a European war that would destroy the capitalist powers and leave the USSR dominant. In short, he shifts the responsibility for WWII away from Hitler and toward Stalin. A lot of historians (Mark Edele, Geoffrey Roberts, and many more) have rightfully dismantled McMeekin's arguments, but what's wild is that the book has really high ratings on websites like Goodreads (4.3) and Amazn (4.7)!
An excellent input and I share your concern. McMeekin’s book is a striking example of how a provocative thesis can travel much farther in popular discourse than it survives in archival scrutiny. His core claim that Stalin deliberately engineered the conditions for a general European war in order to destroy the capitalist powers and emerge dominant effectively relocates primary causation from Berlin to Moscow. That is an extraordinary inversion of responsibility, and it requires extraordinarily strong evidence.
The problem, as historians like Mark Edele and Geoffrey Roberts have shown, is that the evidentiary base does not sustain that inversion. Hitler’s long-articulated program of racial conquest and eastward expansion is abundantly documented. To reframe the war’s outbreak around Stalin’s supposed master plan requires selective reading and interpretive overreach.
What is perhaps most revealing is the gap between scholarly reception and popular ratings. A bold, revisionist narrative that overturns conventional understandings will always have market appeal. However, Goodreads scores are not peer review. They often reward audacity, narrative clarity and polemical force but not archival rigor.
That disconnect itself is part of the larger issue we’ve been discussing. When complex historical debates migrate into a politicized environment, sharp contrarian theses can be amplified far beyond what the evidence warrants. It makes the work of careful, source-driven scholarship all the more essential.
I don´t know how old you are. I am old enough to have talked to participants and survivors of all sides of WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews. My most memorable encounter was an old man who had survived both a Nazi camp and then the Gulag near Norilsk. He was utterly cynical about the respective claims of humanitarian preponderance of both sides. He very simply said that people who are hungry will eat each other. Both Germany and Russia had been ravaged by conditions that are completely unfathomable today. Russia's famines are well known. Less known is the German famine from 1917 - 1919. Two million is a likely guess. Conditions of extreme wont produces a population prone to violence that can be directed inward or outward. You can read Lev Kopelev's memoirs how he was confiscating the last grain from already starving peasants in Ukraine during collectivization or "Каратели" by Ales Adamovich. The last one is about Belorussian collaborators of the Nazis.
Today there's a mystification of WWII on all sides. Good and bad. In reality people simply wanted to eat and survive. The real lessons have been forgotten and that is how the Ukraine war came into being.
Excellent. It is unbelievable that this kind of reinterpretation of history can be made. But the aim is clear - Russia has to be seen as being eternally bad so that they are 'the enemy' to be fought without a second thought and with no mercy. We, the post war generation, KNOW what went on. We KNOW that it was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Nazi War Machine.
History is simply used as convenient at the moment and forgotten as convenient.
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today". -Henry Ford
Excelently writtenwith no missing or extra words, with the used words having maximum weight. It is admirable. What it is also admirable is how such analytical work in fact describes what is hapening as we speak, not in a blink of an eye, we are not there yet, but what in fact are elements of 1984 and Canticle for Leibovitz. I have a small adition to make to what seems an absolute panegiric to Russian heroic efforts in WWII. It was. But Finalnd and Romania did not just join Germany in the war in June 1941 for fun. They joined because they were attacked by the Soviets and territory was taken from their countries. They went to war to recover lost territories. Now, if you add that and also the fact that the Treaty of Non-Agression btw Germany And Soviet Union also ensured the Soviets that Germany will not interfere in Soviet Union strengthening its borders, I won't disputed that. It was in fact a way for Germany to collect enemies of the Soviets. The way the US does now, pushing Ukraine and EU to fight against and keep Russia busy on its western flank while they can more readily operate in south and on the high seas, unhindered.
The thing is, Russia will not attack EU. But it will reciprocate. And likely will not allow any reach of EU forces on the Motherland. Before that to happen, Brussell, Berlin, Paris, London would burn first.
Thank you for both the praise and the substance of your addition.
You’re absolutely right that Finland and Romania did not enter the war in June 1941 in a vacuum. Both had recent territorial grievances against the Soviet Union. Finland after the Winter War of 1939–40, and Romania following the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. In their own national narratives, 1941 was framed as a war of recovery, not simply ideological alignment with Berlin. Any serious historical account has to acknowledge that dimension.
At the same time, two realities coexist. Grievance does not negate the fact that these states became part of a broader German war of annihilation in the East. Nor does the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact erase the prior collapse of collective security or Hitler’s long-articulated expansionist aims. History here is layered, not binary.
On your contemporary analogy, I understand the structural comparison you are drawing about great powers leveraging regional actors. However, we should be careful not to let analogy collapse into inevitability. Strategic competition does not automatically translate into pre-scripted escalation. States signal, posture, deter but outcomes are not mechanistic.
The most important point, perhaps, is your opening one that history is rarely pure panegyric or pure indictment. It is complex, uncomfortable, and often morally entangled. Acknowledging that complexity strengthens the argument rather than weakens it.
A really great piece of work. The cultural penetration of this revisionism is truly astonishing. I have family members actually born during the Second World War who have started to doubt their own memories of the events that, in essence, occurred in their own life times and the aftermath of which formed the backdrop of their formative years.
Great essay. I'm not sure about your conclusion. Historical revisionism is tantamount to an unmasking of our present condition and showcasing its resemblance to a dystopian empire of doublespeak, all the while concealing the "real truth" behind the machinations leading to the build up and subsequent outbreak of hostilities of world war two, which remain obscured from the undiscerning public purview. If anything, our inability to be honest and speak truthfully today is a continuity from the past, and mires us in conflicts exposing historical great games. Ukraine seen in this light has a certain logic. Concerning the diminishing interest in historical study, unfortunately, the same transversal unhealthy societal habit of marginalizing non-conforming voices unaligned with the dominion's self-image and narrative construction, even if laden with appropriate documentary historicity, renders our very system of paper diplomas unfit for the tasks set for itself. This problem goes well beyond only the study of history, which presents the same symptoms infecting all scholarly pursuits today.
Thank you, I appreciate the depth of your reflection.
I agree with you on one key point: there is continuity. The manipulation of narrative is not new. What may be new is the scale, speed, and institutionalization of it. In that sense, today’s distortions are not a rupture from the past but an intensification of longstanding patterns.
Where I would be cautious is in assuming that the “real truth” is fully obscured. Much of it is documented but it competes with louder, simpler frames. The problem may be less total concealment than selective amplification.
Your broader concern about conformity in academia is also well taken. When institutional incentives reward alignment over inquiry, the health of scholarship in all fields, not just history, is affected.
Thank you again for engaging so seriously with the argument.
A nicely written summary, there is only one small nuance of concern about this, who will it be addressed to and who will understand its truth content ?
Where in the West, i.e. in the USA and Western Europe, is there a group of people (young people) who would be interested in this and who are able to understand its truth content? The other day I saw an interview at a well-known (very well-known) leading university in the USA, where they asked university students, showing them a map of the USA, asking what kind of country it depicts, most of the interviewees did not know ! The generations currently growing up in the West are latent illiterates, which is both a state expectation, since it is easy to lead stupid people, and on the other hand they have no interest in history. So I repeat, it is in vain that you want to sow the seeds of truth if they fall on barren soil ! The universities, colleges and schools of the "free world" are instructed to create millions of ignorant people who only consider the slogan Carpe Diem as their goal, their studies are in gender studies, and they are perfect subjects for manipulated politics. With these, it is easy to swallow the fact that the USA and, I should not forget, the UK ( :) ) were the winners of World War II and the Soviet Union with its 27 million victims was only a marginal supporting actor !
And the fact that it was the Red Army that raised the victory flag on the Reichstag, is not in Hollywood movies, so it is not true !
Thank you for this. I understand the frustration behind your comment. It can certainly feel at times as if historical depth has evaporated, especially when basic civic or geographic knowledge appears thin. And yes, popular culture, especially film, plays an enormous role in shaping collective memory. If something does not appear in Hollywood, many assume it is marginal. That is a real cultural phenomenon.
That said, I would gently push back on the idea that the soil is entirely barren. I encounter more curiosity among younger readers than headlines would suggest. Many feel that something is missing in the way history is presented to them. They sense the simplifications and the gaps. What they often lack is not intelligence, but access to serious, calm, non-hysterical analysis that treats them as thinking adults rather than ideological recruits.
It is precisely because popular narratives dominate that careful historical work matters. Not everyone will read it but those who do often become the carriers of a more nuanced understanding. Intellectual shifts rarely begin with majorities but with minorities willing to question prevailing frames.
If anything, the fact that dominant media representations marginalize the Eastern Front is all the more reason to keep documenting it. Memory does not correct itself automatically. It requires people who insist on precision, even when the cultural tide runs the other way.
I am grateful you took the time to engage. Conversations like this are part of the process of keeping historical literacy alive, even if it sometimes feels like swimming upstream.
Well, you're right, sometimes anger can get you into trouble when it comes to forming opinions - And if I look back to the sixties and seventies when I was a teenager, I was criticized by many people for my long hair, even though I was already reading historical novels at the age of six. Unfortunately, what I can blame is the huge informational garbage mountain surrounding today's young people, which hides valuable information from them, without which they will not be able to have an unbiased view of history, for example. Not to mention that governments (and the dark powers behind them) are increasingly using education to take knowledge away from today's generations, and I can see this clearly from the experience I had growing up in a dictatorship. And this sad experience made me very afraid of today's generation.
This isn’t bad history so much as history being repurposed. When memory is made to stabilize alignment, causation becomes negotiable. The cost isn’t just distortion of the past, but loss of strategic realism in the present. Moral clarity gained this way usually buys blindness elsewhere.
History is bunk. So said Henry Ford. And when you scrutinise what primary sources you can find, hidden away in the bowels of a university library, you have acknowledge the validity of that statement.
I concur. It seems that epistemology, logic, and especially methodology are all trumped by modern propaganda. Arguably this is the increasingly efficient culmination of a two-century-long process of privatized cancel culture [1]. More recently it's spread to state-level cancel culture by means of criminal justice systems. People in the West are now many, many times more likely, the more so per capita, to be charged (and prosecuted/convicted) in the West for thought-crimes or no-crimes, than they are in Russia, China combined. [2]
Ironically, In the UK in particular, "too many" juries have been acquitting people [3], so the natural response is "reform" to eliminate jury trials - the excuse being a conveniently sudden urge to "fix" the long-standing problem of underfunding and thus delays [4].
[2] my apologies, I can't relocate the statistics I stumbled across just a few days ago - so take it or leave it!
[3] Even decades ago (during my bar course) iirc the numbers reflected a more than 10% increase in acquittal rate for trial-by-jury versus trial-by-judge or (worst of all) trial-by-lay-magistrate. Oddly, I perceived in practice an additional cultural distinction - the further the distance from metropolitan culture, the seemingly more likely lay magistrates were to acquit. But that is anecdotal / unresearched, and thus any implications would be merely conjectural (until/unless researched).
[4] See for example the proposed abolition of the right to jury trials in England, and the resistance, documented in https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/radical-and-revolutionary. No connection to my suggestion is made - I just find the coincidence alarming. Historically of course juries always did have the reputation of sometimes baffling acquittals, which of course was partly the point as it ameliorates the harshness of any common law.
"From Moscow’s perspective, the Pact with Germany followed the exhaustion of diplomatic alternatives with London, Paris and Warsaw, not ideological convergence with Nazism."
Ask anybody in your life if they have ever heard of Maxim Litvinov and "Collective Security" against Nazis. Answer will probably be close to 100% "No". Jabara's work is nicely trashing the myth of poor little Poland.
The problem with history studies, at least back home, is that there are no decent jobs. People are encouraged to do IT, whereas elites are handling the historical memory. Now, who are these elites at the EU level that are dictating the narrative? People like VdL, Merz, Baerbock, Kallas, Landsbergis and similar characters back home. Revisionist Nazi and quisling posterity.
Before Putin elevated local event of "Immortal Regiment" to the national level and before it went globally, our lot was gloating how soon WWII veterans would all be gone. "Immortal Regiment" preempted this, luckily.
All Western leaders have become quislings. Their selectively applied "multi-culturalism" in practice has been corrupted to a facade, parroting the amorphous elites who created the quislings and falsified by their every cultural action. It seems the Cold War efforts to destroy European culture (arts, music, etc) is insufficient.
The net result will be that the quislings will complete the destruction of Western Europe, beyond fragmented and impoverished nationalist resistance - even if the EU collapses, it may be too late. Ironically, this quisling success arguably may result in cultural domination by the last European civilizational values left standing: those of the Third Rome, sometimes known as Muscovy. This would be comical, were it not also tragic. Fortunately, the best of the Enlightenment values spread to the east before their abandonment in the west.
Wonderful take on an essential topic. And although it raises so many important points, one could still add many others: the elevation of the ‘holodomor’ narrative to the status of a European civic religion, the painting of Russia as the worst colonial power in history … most of it has been around for a long time, but the most blatant distortions have never been trumpeted as shamelessly as now.
Still, I slightly object to your idea this is widely the consequence of a decline of historical knowledge (although it is undeniable that standards both in academic and popular knowledge are rapidly eroding). It is a conscious reinvention of history - not only in the service of foreign policy, but of a deeper ideological agenda. That's at least how it looks from a German perspective - no doubt most Germans always wanted to imagine themselves as victims of the eastern barbarians, but it was long deemed unacceptable to voice it too openly. I am nevertheless shocked by how enthusiastically all these guardrails have been torn down over the last ten years. Historians specialized in Eastern Europe are marching at the forefront - so it's not just ignorance (their professional identity was always primarily about producing anti-soviet propaganda). But it goes beyond that - I can assure that regular Germans love to blubber "Russia is a fascist state" with all signs of relief - the relief of a violent criminal who can openly blame his victim for his atrocities and get acclaim for it.
Thank you for this thoughtful and candid reflection. You are absolutely right to push back on the idea that this is only about declining historical knowledge. There is clearly something more intentional happening. In many cases it does feel less like confusion and more like deliberate reinvention where history is being consciously reordered to serve present ideological and geopolitical needs. That’s an important distinction, and I agree it deserves emphasis.
Your reflections from a German perspective are especially valuable. The emotional dimension you describe, especially the sense of moral release that comes from projecting fascism outward, is something I think many observers sense but rarely articulate. The tearing down of former guardrails over the past decade has been striking and not confined to one country. What was once considered rhetorically unacceptable now circulates freely, often with institutional backing.
At the same time, I try to hold two things together - yes, there is conscious reframing underway, but it is also enabled by a public sphere that has lost much of its historical depth and resilience. Intent and erosion reinforce one another.
I’m very glad you added these layers to the discussion. If you’re interested, I’ll be exploring the Holodomor narrative, memory politics in Germany and the ideological drivers behind this shift in more detail in future essays. Your perspectives will enrich those discussions.
Thanks for the kind reply. As I said, I am perfectly ok with your main points, especially emphasizing that we are witnessing a top-down implementation of historical narratives, amplified by intellectual impoverishment - "intent and erosion reinforce one another" captures it perfectly. Just as the depletion of language and the growing audacity of propaganda are intertwined.
German memory politics in respect to Russia/SU is particular of course, although I am more and more inclined to think the British have a similarly psychotic relation (but maybe it's just an elites thing). However, the ground for the new narrative was already prepared in all of the West by the dogma of totalitarianism, Natostan's ideological cornerstone.
It's amazing to see how much historical revisionism has crept into some corners of scholarship. The most blatant is Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. In the course of 800+ pages, he argues that Stalin deliberately provoked and manipulated events to spark a European war that would destroy the capitalist powers and leave the USSR dominant. In short, he shifts the responsibility for WWII away from Hitler and toward Stalin. A lot of historians (Mark Edele, Geoffrey Roberts, and many more) have rightfully dismantled McMeekin's arguments, but what's wild is that the book has really high ratings on websites like Goodreads (4.3) and Amazn (4.7)!
An excellent input and I share your concern. McMeekin’s book is a striking example of how a provocative thesis can travel much farther in popular discourse than it survives in archival scrutiny. His core claim that Stalin deliberately engineered the conditions for a general European war in order to destroy the capitalist powers and emerge dominant effectively relocates primary causation from Berlin to Moscow. That is an extraordinary inversion of responsibility, and it requires extraordinarily strong evidence.
The problem, as historians like Mark Edele and Geoffrey Roberts have shown, is that the evidentiary base does not sustain that inversion. Hitler’s long-articulated program of racial conquest and eastward expansion is abundantly documented. To reframe the war’s outbreak around Stalin’s supposed master plan requires selective reading and interpretive overreach.
What is perhaps most revealing is the gap between scholarly reception and popular ratings. A bold, revisionist narrative that overturns conventional understandings will always have market appeal. However, Goodreads scores are not peer review. They often reward audacity, narrative clarity and polemical force but not archival rigor.
That disconnect itself is part of the larger issue we’ve been discussing. When complex historical debates migrate into a politicized environment, sharp contrarian theses can be amplified far beyond what the evidence warrants. It makes the work of careful, source-driven scholarship all the more essential.
I don´t know how old you are. I am old enough to have talked to participants and survivors of all sides of WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles and Jews. My most memorable encounter was an old man who had survived both a Nazi camp and then the Gulag near Norilsk. He was utterly cynical about the respective claims of humanitarian preponderance of both sides. He very simply said that people who are hungry will eat each other. Both Germany and Russia had been ravaged by conditions that are completely unfathomable today. Russia's famines are well known. Less known is the German famine from 1917 - 1919. Two million is a likely guess. Conditions of extreme wont produces a population prone to violence that can be directed inward or outward. You can read Lev Kopelev's memoirs how he was confiscating the last grain from already starving peasants in Ukraine during collectivization or "Каратели" by Ales Adamovich. The last one is about Belorussian collaborators of the Nazis.
Today there's a mystification of WWII on all sides. Good and bad. In reality people simply wanted to eat and survive. The real lessons have been forgotten and that is how the Ukraine war came into being.
Excellent. It is unbelievable that this kind of reinterpretation of history can be made. But the aim is clear - Russia has to be seen as being eternally bad so that they are 'the enemy' to be fought without a second thought and with no mercy. We, the post war generation, KNOW what went on. We KNOW that it was the Red Army that tore the guts out of the Nazi War Machine.
History is simply used as convenient at the moment and forgotten as convenient.
"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today". -Henry Ford
Excelently writtenwith no missing or extra words, with the used words having maximum weight. It is admirable. What it is also admirable is how such analytical work in fact describes what is hapening as we speak, not in a blink of an eye, we are not there yet, but what in fact are elements of 1984 and Canticle for Leibovitz. I have a small adition to make to what seems an absolute panegiric to Russian heroic efforts in WWII. It was. But Finalnd and Romania did not just join Germany in the war in June 1941 for fun. They joined because they were attacked by the Soviets and territory was taken from their countries. They went to war to recover lost territories. Now, if you add that and also the fact that the Treaty of Non-Agression btw Germany And Soviet Union also ensured the Soviets that Germany will not interfere in Soviet Union strengthening its borders, I won't disputed that. It was in fact a way for Germany to collect enemies of the Soviets. The way the US does now, pushing Ukraine and EU to fight against and keep Russia busy on its western flank while they can more readily operate in south and on the high seas, unhindered.
The thing is, Russia will not attack EU. But it will reciprocate. And likely will not allow any reach of EU forces on the Motherland. Before that to happen, Brussell, Berlin, Paris, London would burn first.
Thank you for both the praise and the substance of your addition.
You’re absolutely right that Finland and Romania did not enter the war in June 1941 in a vacuum. Both had recent territorial grievances against the Soviet Union. Finland after the Winter War of 1939–40, and Romania following the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. In their own national narratives, 1941 was framed as a war of recovery, not simply ideological alignment with Berlin. Any serious historical account has to acknowledge that dimension.
At the same time, two realities coexist. Grievance does not negate the fact that these states became part of a broader German war of annihilation in the East. Nor does the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact erase the prior collapse of collective security or Hitler’s long-articulated expansionist aims. History here is layered, not binary.
On your contemporary analogy, I understand the structural comparison you are drawing about great powers leveraging regional actors. However, we should be careful not to let analogy collapse into inevitability. Strategic competition does not automatically translate into pre-scripted escalation. States signal, posture, deter but outcomes are not mechanistic.
The most important point, perhaps, is your opening one that history is rarely pure panegyric or pure indictment. It is complex, uncomfortable, and often morally entangled. Acknowledging that complexity strengthens the argument rather than weakens it.
Thank you again for engaging so thoughtfully.
A really great piece of work. The cultural penetration of this revisionism is truly astonishing. I have family members actually born during the Second World War who have started to doubt their own memories of the events that, in essence, occurred in their own life times and the aftermath of which formed the backdrop of their formative years.
Most Americans think Tom Hanks won World War Two.
Great essay. I'm not sure about your conclusion. Historical revisionism is tantamount to an unmasking of our present condition and showcasing its resemblance to a dystopian empire of doublespeak, all the while concealing the "real truth" behind the machinations leading to the build up and subsequent outbreak of hostilities of world war two, which remain obscured from the undiscerning public purview. If anything, our inability to be honest and speak truthfully today is a continuity from the past, and mires us in conflicts exposing historical great games. Ukraine seen in this light has a certain logic. Concerning the diminishing interest in historical study, unfortunately, the same transversal unhealthy societal habit of marginalizing non-conforming voices unaligned with the dominion's self-image and narrative construction, even if laden with appropriate documentary historicity, renders our very system of paper diplomas unfit for the tasks set for itself. This problem goes well beyond only the study of history, which presents the same symptoms infecting all scholarly pursuits today.
Thank you, I appreciate the depth of your reflection.
I agree with you on one key point: there is continuity. The manipulation of narrative is not new. What may be new is the scale, speed, and institutionalization of it. In that sense, today’s distortions are not a rupture from the past but an intensification of longstanding patterns.
Where I would be cautious is in assuming that the “real truth” is fully obscured. Much of it is documented but it competes with louder, simpler frames. The problem may be less total concealment than selective amplification.
Your broader concern about conformity in academia is also well taken. When institutional incentives reward alignment over inquiry, the health of scholarship in all fields, not just history, is affected.
Thank you again for engaging so seriously with the argument.
A nicely written summary, there is only one small nuance of concern about this, who will it be addressed to and who will understand its truth content ?
Where in the West, i.e. in the USA and Western Europe, is there a group of people (young people) who would be interested in this and who are able to understand its truth content? The other day I saw an interview at a well-known (very well-known) leading university in the USA, where they asked university students, showing them a map of the USA, asking what kind of country it depicts, most of the interviewees did not know ! The generations currently growing up in the West are latent illiterates, which is both a state expectation, since it is easy to lead stupid people, and on the other hand they have no interest in history. So I repeat, it is in vain that you want to sow the seeds of truth if they fall on barren soil ! The universities, colleges and schools of the "free world" are instructed to create millions of ignorant people who only consider the slogan Carpe Diem as their goal, their studies are in gender studies, and they are perfect subjects for manipulated politics. With these, it is easy to swallow the fact that the USA and, I should not forget, the UK ( :) ) were the winners of World War II and the Soviet Union with its 27 million victims was only a marginal supporting actor !
And the fact that it was the Red Army that raised the victory flag on the Reichstag, is not in Hollywood movies, so it is not true !
Thank you for this. I understand the frustration behind your comment. It can certainly feel at times as if historical depth has evaporated, especially when basic civic or geographic knowledge appears thin. And yes, popular culture, especially film, plays an enormous role in shaping collective memory. If something does not appear in Hollywood, many assume it is marginal. That is a real cultural phenomenon.
That said, I would gently push back on the idea that the soil is entirely barren. I encounter more curiosity among younger readers than headlines would suggest. Many feel that something is missing in the way history is presented to them. They sense the simplifications and the gaps. What they often lack is not intelligence, but access to serious, calm, non-hysterical analysis that treats them as thinking adults rather than ideological recruits.
It is precisely because popular narratives dominate that careful historical work matters. Not everyone will read it but those who do often become the carriers of a more nuanced understanding. Intellectual shifts rarely begin with majorities but with minorities willing to question prevailing frames.
If anything, the fact that dominant media representations marginalize the Eastern Front is all the more reason to keep documenting it. Memory does not correct itself automatically. It requires people who insist on precision, even when the cultural tide runs the other way.
I am grateful you took the time to engage. Conversations like this are part of the process of keeping historical literacy alive, even if it sometimes feels like swimming upstream.
Well, you're right, sometimes anger can get you into trouble when it comes to forming opinions - And if I look back to the sixties and seventies when I was a teenager, I was criticized by many people for my long hair, even though I was already reading historical novels at the age of six. Unfortunately, what I can blame is the huge informational garbage mountain surrounding today's young people, which hides valuable information from them, without which they will not be able to have an unbiased view of history, for example. Not to mention that governments (and the dark powers behind them) are increasingly using education to take knowledge away from today's generations, and I can see this clearly from the experience I had growing up in a dictatorship. And this sad experience made me very afraid of today's generation.
Thank you for this piece, translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/linstrumentalisation-de-la-memoire
Thank you very much!
With pleasure !
This isn’t bad history so much as history being repurposed. When memory is made to stabilize alignment, causation becomes negotiable. The cost isn’t just distortion of the past, but loss of strategic realism in the present. Moral clarity gained this way usually buys blindness elsewhere.
History is bunk. So said Henry Ford. And when you scrutinise what primary sources you can find, hidden away in the bowels of a university library, you have acknowledge the validity of that statement.
Very well said, and thank you for the references.
I concur. It seems that epistemology, logic, and especially methodology are all trumped by modern propaganda. Arguably this is the increasingly efficient culmination of a two-century-long process of privatized cancel culture [1]. More recently it's spread to state-level cancel culture by means of criminal justice systems. People in the West are now many, many times more likely, the more so per capita, to be charged (and prosecuted/convicted) in the West for thought-crimes or no-crimes, than they are in Russia, China combined. [2]
Ironically, In the UK in particular, "too many" juries have been acquitting people [3], so the natural response is "reform" to eliminate jury trials - the excuse being a conveniently sudden urge to "fix" the long-standing problem of underfunding and thus delays [4].
[1] If interested, I've written about the history of privatized cancel culture (in draft) in https://democracyandconstitutions.substack.com/p/cancel-culture-as-democratic-value.
[2] my apologies, I can't relocate the statistics I stumbled across just a few days ago - so take it or leave it!
[3] Even decades ago (during my bar course) iirc the numbers reflected a more than 10% increase in acquittal rate for trial-by-jury versus trial-by-judge or (worst of all) trial-by-lay-magistrate. Oddly, I perceived in practice an additional cultural distinction - the further the distance from metropolitan culture, the seemingly more likely lay magistrates were to acquit. But that is anecdotal / unresearched, and thus any implications would be merely conjectural (until/unless researched).
[4] See for example the proposed abolition of the right to jury trials in England, and the resistance, documented in https://rozenberg.substack.com/p/radical-and-revolutionary. No connection to my suggestion is made - I just find the coincidence alarming. Historically of course juries always did have the reputation of sometimes baffling acquittals, which of course was partly the point as it ameliorates the harshness of any common law.