We all know in outline how World War II turned out. We know who won militarily and who lost, but we have tended to sidestep the uncomfortable reality that the USSR was one of the military victors while being just as evil as Nazi Germany. Stalin was just as evil as Hitler – we don’t stress that as we should.
The point about degrees of evil may be argued forever but it isn’t worth it. Both regimes were appallingly evil but one ended up on the winning side. Evil acquired a certain degree of respect and that was a disaster we still have to live with today.
As we also know, the USSR had its external fans and apologists before the war, as did Nazi Germany, but one fan base survived the conflict and even the downfall of the USSR, while the other, to a good enough approximation did not survive. We may usefully abide by this position in spite of ludicrously extreme political rhetoric we still see today.
In other words evil political ambitions and a vast and evil regime survived WWII as one of the victors, taking its place on the podium with the good guys. Victors are almost always the good guys anyway - as we know. With the triumph of Stalin’s USSR in mind, it is worth asking what effect this had on our perception of respect because it seems clear enough that respect has become increasingly political rather than a simple moral concept.
The issue is worth posing because pre-war life seems to have been different in ways which are nebulous and now largely obscured by those verbal minefields fans of political rhetoric love to lay down. Pre-war culture is not easy to analyse because we are not part of what is now a bygone culture, however familiar it still appears to be. We cannot live it as it was lived and pick up nuances we may no longer be aware of.
For example, it seems to have been a world where social obligations could be more personal than we generally see today, less avoidable morally. This is not a suggestion that pre-war life should be viewed through those notorious rose-tinted spectacles, but broad social changes are always a mix of gains and losses. It is not good policy to pretend there were no other losses after WWII apart from all those wasted lives and colossal physical damage.
That pre-war world also seems to have been one where moral choices could also be more personal than today because do as you would be done by was more fundamental than it is now. It was an ancient religious precept however often it may have been dishonoured. It may be worth adding that dishonouring it was a well-known failing in social life, known and understood in a way we have not retained.
This pre-war world still seems similar to ours because it was very similar, because many of us alive today once knew people who lived through those times. Yet we also know those people and their times were a little different. As respect becomes political rather than personal and moral, do as you would be done by becomes irrelevant as people today are less inclined to accept such a strong level of personal responsibility. Now we are more inclined to allow such abstruse matters to disappear into the memory hole that is political rhetoric. It isn’t my fault goes the often covert refrain.
It is as if the aftermath of WWII redefined how we think of ourselves and reshaped the stories we tell in our attempts to live harmoniously with the wider world. Yet as the USSR, one of the most evil regimes in human history, emerged as a good guy from WWII we have an obvious problem with social narratives where respect is a lesson we must absorb if things are to continue as we wish them to continue. Aspects of social life must be worthy of our respect or not and the difference must be clear and personal. Otherwise how does anyone try to be respectable in its straightforward moral sense – worthy of respect?
The cracks appeared fairly quickly within a few decades of 1945. An example of that is how we never seemed to hold on to the political will to secure our own borders against undesirable social changes which were bound to be a concomitant result of large scale immigration.
Respect for what the wartime generation defended should have been morally secure after WWII but it was not. It all carried little weight with those who were sufficiently secure themselves to ignore the obvious threat of cultural drift, a threat which was not ignored by a majority of the population. But this did not seem to matter politically as the personal responsibility entailed by the personal nature of respect had lost ground to diffuse notions of political expediency and a culture which evades blame from the highest level downwards.
A moral determination to defend ourselves and respect our purpose in doing so faded quite rapidly after WWII. It was eroded by a strangely defeatist narrative that there is nothing worth defending apart from the freedom to attack and destroy those who try to defend what they value and respect. This freedom to defend ourselves had been an essential part of fighting WWII but afterwards it was undermined within a matter of a few decades.
After all, if one of the WWII victors was a supremely evil regime, what is there to defend? This is the nihilism Dostoevsky hated so much and it is still with us - an ineradicable aspect of any political psyche. In fact Dostoevsky’s outlook may be worth emphasising here – nihilism is ineradicable aspect of any political psyche. We see it today – now.
Culture matters because this is where our knowledge of personal respect resides in all its subtleties, nuances and strengths. An ancient evolved culture such as ours prior to WWII was not at all simple and far from perfect but it was understood from childhood onwards and its concepts of respect and respectable were understood. This was a vast advantage.
Change all that towards prescriptive political notions of appropriate and inappropriate, lay the minefields of political expediency and the moral basis of personal respect is gone forever.
