Fighting About History
A history podcaster apparently went on Tucker Carlson’s show with a number of revisionist takes on WWII. While I’m told the podcast itself was at least somewhat nuanced, the guy responded to attacks on Twitter with flamebait responses like Churchill Was WWII’s Greatest Villain.
A bunch of boring argument ensued.
FWIW I pretty much share the conventional view on WWII (Nazis boo, Soviets boo but not as boo in the short term, America yay, England yay, victory mismanaged) though I also don’t get worked up about people with chops arguing points or entertaining counterfactuals. But here I am going to try to say something that hasn’t been repeated elsewhere already (and I invite you to do the same). It’s something that should have some application to Mormon history.
A lot of the standard revisionist takes seem like the standard Western mythology, simply inverted. Instead of saying the Western allies were decent folks sometimes forced into doing distasteful things by the limits of their understanding at the time and their domestic and geopolitical situation and also because they were fighting a horrible aggressive power, they just say that the Germans were basically decent folks but forced into distasteful things etc etc etc.
Because I am willing to talk to almost anybody respectfully, I have engaged some of these people and drawn them out. Why do they think this way? Why does it matter to them? A common answer is that they feel that malign forces in our country attack things they hold dear using WWII mythology. “Hitler bad, therefore transfer parental authority to school administrators!” And since they feel that they are deeply under attack by the latter, they throw out the whole thing including the former. “Oh, yeah? Well, Hitler good!”
Here’s the point. Conventional wisdom is often wrong and always flawed. It is also always too small, or it would not be conventional. But greatness does not lie in rejecting the conventional wisdom. Greatness lies in transcending it.
So while its pretty funny to just reject standard anti-Mormon attacks on Church history–“the Mountain Meadows Massacre was good actually”–its a mistake to do so. At the same time, there is nothing intrinsically superior in a nuanced view of church history over a standard propagandistic Yay the Saints take or a standard propagandistic Malicious Mormon Menace take. Nuance should only be a waypoint on a journey to a synthesis, which is something I do not currently have nor does anyone else that I know of.
Feel free to comment but I invite you not to just rehash the historical debates over again. Feel free to preface your remarks with “I am a Good Person who Loves America,” or “I am a Brave, Independent Thinker” if you must.
Filed under: We transcend your bourgeois categories | No Tag
E.C.
September 9, 2024
Look, my grandpa was a WW2 vet. Once, and only once (to my knowledge), did he talk about it – when my brother and I asked him to participate in a history fair. Somewhere we have a tape of him talking about what it was like to be part of the Signal Corps on the front lines in the Philippines, being shot at while stringing wires.
He was then transferred to the German front toward the end of the war, where he was one of the first soldiers to enter a concentration camp. My stoic old grandpa, who had never shown much more emotion than vague irritation to me, broke down in tears as he gave a somewhat child-appropriate take on what he’d seen there.
The sheer amount of human suffering by soldiers and civilians on both sides of a war is terrible. It’s more terrible as more countries are drawn into the conflict.
So yeah, no one power had perfect moral rectitude in WW2 – I live near one of the places where they imprisoned innocent Japanese-Americans – but some things are simply evil, and you can’t just revise that truth away.
Unless you actually live through the events yourself, or the primary people of interest keep detailed records of their motives, there is no way that anyone can possibly ‘know’ history enough to confidently assign blame or praise on that basis. What we CAN do is look at results, and some results are good, some evil, and some exist in a murky middle.
Tl;dr: History (and Church history) are complicated, because people and the world are complicated.
[]
September 9, 2024
FWIW Hugh Nibley absolutely despised Churchill.
Zen
September 9, 2024
Some people seem to think nuanced is just taking a statement X and saying ashkually, NOT X.
It is knowing something in the world is wrong, and desiring to look smart. Sometimes, history and people are complicated and people are just doing the best they can.
Similarly, I don’t respect people who blithely insist we should have never dropped the bomb. Perhaps we shouldn’t have, but most of the time, the people saying it have no skin in the game. They were not the ones being shot at.
Sute
September 9, 2024
The approach latter-day saints should take is one informed by one of the central messages of the book of Mormon:
Multi generational conflict errodes the moral fabric of society, and being forced into an us vs them dichotomy of good and evil creates space for secret combinations to thrive and make everyone a loser no matter who “wins”.
Sound familiar?
Zen
September 10, 2024
Just to be contrary to my own point, I have really enjoyed Lafayette Lee’s discussion on Nixon.
The press and the institutions that attacked him are not the heroes they have been portrayed to be.
Parsing the facts we are given only gets more difficult, though the decentralized nature of the Internet at least gives us access to things we didn’t have before.
This is interesting, because in not many years, we may have the press lying shamelessly about us again. I have noticed papers deliberately using Mormon VS the full name of the church.