Many philosophers have conceptualised an “End of History”, a point of stable equilibrium to which social, political, and cultural development are inevitably attracted, and whereafter what it means to be a person in the world will be more-or-less fixed. Francis Fukuyama is somewhat famously credited with the idea that the spontaneous demolition of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union represented our final victory over the unstable equilibria of feudalism and tribalism and totalitarianism around which human history had fluctuated before the early 1990s—that, though we perhaps had not yet reached the point of stable equilibrium, we were on something of a terminal decline to it as the forces of commercial and political economy wound down into their states of maximum entropy.
History does not work like this, and Mr. Fukuyama has recently begun modifying (if not to say retconning) his thesis to account for the stubborn refusal of reality to conform to his pontifications. History is much closer to biology than it is to gravity; its agents use available energy to minimise local entropy, and while there can be ages and even eons in which the patterns of history change so slowly that generations can pass without noticing them, those patterns change all the same. And, once in a while, a natural disaster occurs of such depth and breadth that the old paradigm is burnt away and a new one emerges from the ashes.
The Iron Curtain fell just a scant few years after I was born, and so the West as I have known it personally has existed without the pall it once cast over Europe, except as a rapidly-fading memory of mostly-retired statesmen and bureaucrats. There are today many young men and women, born in Warsaw and Budapest and Prague and Dresden, who have never had cause to fear Soviet tanks rolling down their streets to prop up decrepit dictatorships; people who can stroll across Potsdamer Platz without even noticing the line of bricks cutting across the sidewalk, placed there to remember the concrete and barbed wire and soldiers and land mines set to keep their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents from being able to do just that.
The fall of the Berlin Wall did not signal the End of History, and if we’re being honest it didn’t signal all that much of a change in the West, much less an epoch-redefining disruption. But the wall’s erection did mark the definitive end of the West’s most recent—and, again if we’re being honest, most likely its final—civil war.
It was then that the West’s identity was settled as a collection of multi-ethnic religiously pluralist nation-states ruled by liberal democracies under the security umbrella and cultural hegemony of the United States, with varying languages and architecture and customs but essentially identical systems of law and economy and social values, who forswore war upon one another and gave the great body of their collective citizenry three generations of unprecedented peace and freedom.
That freedom and that peace came at an enormous cost, summing to something like a hundred million lives across Europe, North Africa, and Asia. For our purpose we will pay only the scantest of attention to the Asian half of the conflict. It is true that Japan and South Korea and India have so much in common with the West today that they are at least arguably honorary members of the club; it is also true that the crimes against humanity the Japanese committed in Korea and China and Indochina and Oceania are worthy of consideration and condemnation as of a piece if not of a scope with the monstrosities the Germans unleashed upon Europe.
Yet the fate of the West did not turn on the war in Asia. There is no scenario in which Japan could have conquered the United States and Canada, much less the rest of the planet; indeed, their wildest dreams did not encompass such flights of fancy. But the Germans aspired to conquer the whole of the West, and afterward the whole of the world — and despite the likely strategic impracticability of those ambitions, the Germans launched a series of wars that took the lives of more than fifty million people before the Germans’ aspirations were stilled.
Let us therefore examine this series of wars — which we collect under the name of the Second World War — as a Western civil war; that is, as a conflict to once and for all determine the character, values, economy, political structure, and the very ethnic makeup of the West in the last century and into our own. These were certainly the terms under which the Germans who instigated the conflict in Europe operated, and had they gotten their way, their victory would have heralded a very different West than the one into which we were born, and we would have all been the poorer for it.
The victorious faction of this civil war eventually consisted of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States — with notable contributions from French colonial forces and evacuated French soldiers under the banner of the so-called Free French, as well as soldiers and partisans from conquered countries in Europe, particularly France (again), Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Greece. By convention, we term this faction the Allies, or the Allied Powers, and the world we inhabit is the world that these powers spent millions of lives in order to build.
The United Kingdom, France, and the United States had been allied against Germany by the end of the First World War, but this alliance did not remain in force very long after the Germans capitulated. Instead, France and Britain tasked themselves with enforcing the Treaty of Versailles upon a resentful Germany and drawing arbitrary lines in Middle Eastern sand. The consequences of those lines reverberate in Middle Eastern politics to this day, and have had serious consequences in our own lifetimes.
There was also plenty of resentment to go around after the First World War; France had been devastated by it, with much of the vaunted Western Front cutting through the northern part of the country, at one point within artillery range of Paris itself. Nearly two million Frenchmen gave their lives to keep the Germans from conquering them then, and to this day there are regions of the Ardennes where humans are forbidden entry because of chemical ordinance from that pointless and terrible war.
Britain emerged from the First World War ostensibly at the height of its power, in firm control of about a quarter of the world’s surface and about a quarter of the world’s population, allied with its historical rival and enjoying friendly relations with anyone else who could reasonably threaten its naval supremacy. Yet Britain was also far from unscathed — more than a million men had died, in France and Belgium and Greece and the Middle East, and Britain had relied heavily upon its colonies for manpower and strategic depth in a way it had never needed to do before. In particular the settler colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand used their participation in the war to accelerate the development of their own national identities, distinct from being British subjects.
And, perhaps most profoundly, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, after a series of revolts and small-scale wars within Ireland led to four-fifths of the island gaining political self-determination for the first time in hundreds of years. Thus the tide of Britain reached its high-water mark in the wake of the First World War, a position from which it could only ebb.
Surrounded by two oceans, with a continent at its disposal and another more-or-less under its sole influence, it is hardly surprising that the United States retreated into splendid isolation shortly after the conclusion of the First World War. The government which had actually declared war attempted to keep the US involved in European affairs — including proposing the League of Nations, a sort of proto-United Nations — yet American voters and federal politicians were not persuaded to allow their government to actually join the League, to entangle the United States permanently in the intrigues and squabbles of what they regarded as the Old Continent, to risk another batch of young men on a foolhardy European war. So the Americans withdrew, and the American army returned to being a glorified protection racket in Central and South America, at the beck and call of American business interests.
A notable exception to this policy was US intervention in the Russian Civil War, which broke out during the latter years of the First World War and lasted years beyond that war’s conclusion; along with Britain and France, the United States attempted to prevent a Communist takeover of the Russian Empire, in something of a foreshadowing of the second half of the 1900’s. Arguably in keeping with many of these future skirmishes, a lot of locals died and the Americans wound up withdrawing their forces in the face of a Communist victory. At least seven million people died in that war, more than twice as many Russians as had died in the First World War — if indeed the two conflicts, and those which came after, can be neatly delineated for the Russian people involved in them.
The Soviet Union emerged from the Russian Civil War, replacing the aristocracy of the Russian Empire with a so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. In many ways, the Soviet Union was indeed an improvement for many Soviet citizens over the preceding imperial order, at least for those who survived the Soviet Union’s formation.
For example, the early days of the new regime saw rapid economic growth, with the economy notably growing every year of the Great Depression that so ravaged the populations of the West during the entirety of the 1930’s. Of course, this proves only that Communism is a better system of organising an economy than a decade of warfare in a country’s most populous and productive regions.
The Soviets also officially instituted equality between men and women, and the reality on the ground came reasonably close to meeting this ideal in many areas of society and economy. Abortion was legalised in the Soviet Union decades before the United States or Great Britain, and female participation in the economy — particularly in industrial labour and in the hard sciences and even military service — outstripped the West for nearly the entirety of the Soviet Union’s existence.
The cost that Soviet citizens paid for this economic development and social enlightenment was high, however; tens of thousands of landowners were forcefully dispossessed, dissidents — which is to say, anyone who was not a faithful member of the Communist Party and a fair few who were — were murdered by the thousands and enslaved by the tens of thousands, and the state lay claim to virtually all agricultural and industrial output in any case. Of particular interest is the artificial famine we remember as the Holodomor, when the dictatorship of the proletariat decided Ukrainian wheat was worth more on the international market than it was in Ukrainian bellies, and about four million Soviet subjects in Ukraine were starved to death.
These are the nations responsible for the social contours and political borders of our modern West, for defeating Germany and its allies and ensuring their vision of the future could not succeed. But goddamn it if the Germans didn’t try, and in order to appreciate the world we have built, we should investigate the world that Germany tried to conjure into being at the cost of so many millions of human beings.
As mentioned at the end of the previous installment, Germany after the First World War was politically unstable and economically in shambles for more than a decade following its defeat at the hands if the Entente Cordiale. The Emperor was deposed, along with the remaining German kings, whose union of kingdoms was eventually replaced with a furtive federal democracy that we remember as the Weimar Republic — though, then as now, the seat of power lay Berlin.
While the country did not fall to open civil war, there were many factions of anarchists, socialists, monarchists, and incipient fascists competing with one another for the privilege of toppling this democratic government. As in a proper democracy, the contest was fought with voices in debating halls and private parlours, with ink in pamphlets and in articles, with new-fangled microphones propagating through the airwaves and the wires. But it was also fought with knives in dark corners and shadowed cellars, with broken bottles in alleyways and parks, and with old-fashioned blood running through the streets of Berlin and Munich and Cologne.
This unending chaos, in part, convinced the captains of German industry and the sclerotic bureaucrats and windbag generals to back the National Socialist German Worker’s Party to form the government in the aftermath of the election of 1933. Partly this was out of a foolish notion that they could control the National Socialists; partly it was out of terror of real socialism, socialism as it was practiced in the Soviet Union, where the death rate for the ruling class rivalled that of the peasantry. The National Socialists weren’t socialists at all, of course; they were fascists, and something beyond fascists…and they were incapable of being controlled.
Fascism itself was born in Italy, named for the fasces of the Roman Empire. At its core, fascism posits a refinement of the idea of the nation, and a redefinition the relationship of the nation to the state. As you will recall, the Napoleonic era saw the first inklings of nationhood as we know it, as something more than a collection of people who share a common culture and language, but rather as the wellspring of sovereignty — the source of a state’s authority over its subjects. Fascism, at its core, is something like an inversion of this line of reasoning; it places sovereignty as an intrinsic part of the state, and the fulfillment of the national character as the sole purpose of the state’s authority. In the fascist imagination, an individual human being is a mere expression of this national character, and as such, every subject is but an instrument of the collective will of the state.
Italian fascists harboured a dream of recreating their ancestral empire, of turning the Mediterranean into an Italian lake — in other words, they wanted to make Italia great again in their own time. In the course of events, they made small strides toward this end by conquering stretches of Africa and bits of Dalmatia, and hanging their flags in a Greece that Germany conquered, before eventually losing the better part of a generation of young men to the Allied Powers.
But that is getting ahead of ourselves. Fascism as an idea spread beyond Italy, and indeed beyond the Alps. It found a particular home in the hearts of the Germans who fell under its sway, who came to embody the fascist ideal and implement the fascist idea far more than the Italians ever could. It is perhaps not surprising that fascism took such firm root in Italy and Germany; these two states were formed out of military conquest inspired by Romantic and Napoleonic notions of nationhood, and their conceptions of nationhood became ever more reactionary during and after their experiences in the First World War.
Though Italy and Germany were on opposite sides of that conflict, once fascism came to power in both of these countries, they became fast friends and natural allies; no other nation debased itself quite so much as Italy for German favour, and few other nations suffered as much as a result.
But where the Italians hat the civilised myths of Rome out of which to build their state-based nation, the German fascists looked to their Germanic barbarian ancestors for their own idea of nationhood. The inspiration of this ancient past was no less drenched in myth; on the contrary, given the Germanic peoples’ antiquity and lack of literacy, far more myth than fact could be conjured up from the deranged imaginations of German fascists.
One of those conjured myths insisted that the original Germans came from outer space; that these extraterrestrials landed in southern Scandinavia thousands of years ago, constituting a ‘pure’ race the National Socialists called Aryans. Now, there actually was an ancient ethnic group we call Aryans, but these were among the ancestors of the modern Iranian and some Indian people — who, for all of the highs and lows of their well-storied history, are far removed from Germans in most every respect.
The National Socialists reconceived the German nation as synonymous with das deutsche Volk, the German people — and refounded both ideas upon racial purity, with an invented hierarchy that placed the direct descendants of this fictitious race of Aryan ancient aliens above all others. That this race’s “purity” was measured in physical traits associated with a certain Scandinavian ideal which isn’t even ubiquitous in Scandinavia, and that this hierarchy was thought up by pathetic men with pot bellies and brown hair and brown eyes in any case, is one of the many hypocrisies and contradictions with which National Socialism was conceived.
Under this hierarchy, then, the Scandinavians were considered somehow more German than the Germans, while the English and the French and the men of the Low Countries were considered German-adjacent, the only true candidates for Germanisation upon their conquest and subjugation — where Germanisation of human beings was considered otherwise impossible. An inferior man could not become German. One could only be born into das Volk and its close cousins, or be cursed to inferiority, with one’s racial distance from Germanity inversely proportional to one’s worth as a human being. Only territory could become German, could be Germanified, by denuding it of its non-German inhabitants and replacing them with Germans.
Of special note is that this racial hierarchy, and especially the legal framework which the National Socialist state effectuated, took a great part of its inspiration from the so-called Jim Crow laws of the United States. This legal regime was crafted after the Civil War to reimpose the legal and social supremacy of white Americans over the descendants of African slaves; much like the Aryan myth, Jim Crow contained myriad contradictions, chief among them grading people’s worth by what proportion of “white” blood they contained while insisting that mixing between the races was both legally and biologically impossible.
The German legal regime we remember as the Nuremberg Laws would have formed the legal foundation of the Germanic West under a supposed National Socialist victory. There would have been very little personal freedom and not even theoretical equality between the sexes or different groups of people separated by the National Socialist conception of race or physical ability; women would have been proscribed to domesticity and religious conformity, and even outside the codified racial hierarchy, anyone considered a “useless eater” — unable to meaningfully contribute to the economy or to Germanic racial purity in some way — would have had no rights at all.
Politically, the state would have been an authoritarian nightmare, with one man exercising so much power that Louis the Fourteenth would orgasm himself to death at the thought. This leader’s word would have been law, his only constraints guided by the founding principles and the evolving guidelines of National Socialism, however those might have developed.
Culturally, Christianity would have been attenuated and replaced by the National Socialist death cult’s religion of Aryan supremacy, combined with ancient blood myths and then-modern pseudoscience. Millions of pixels have been shed over whether the National Socialists were Christian or atheist, with Christians usually claiming they were the latter while atheists usually claim they are the former. But the truth is that National Socialism was neither; its cosmology and morality were both pre- and post-Christian. The myths upon which the National Socialists attempted to re-forge the German nation and impose upon the rest of the world were soaked in the blood of Germania, of the people who brought down the Western Roman Empire and whose pagan descendants became known to us as Vikings.
And yet the vast majority of Germans — and many National Socialists themselves — were committed Christians of one kind or another until the very end of the National Socialist project. Had that project succeeded, the resulting culture would have been one with no mercy for the weak, with no room for doubt or uncertainty, and with no patience for kindness or meekness.
Not every German was a National Socialist, of course, much like not every German was a camp guard at Auschwitz (and not a few camp guards weren’t German either, by the by). Yet, regardless of their individual hopes and dreams and values, millions of Germans were conscripted by this enhanced Germanic fascism, by this cult of death. The whole of German society was instrumentalised to conquer Europe — to Germanise its western populations and to Germanify its vast eastern Steppe. This monstrous vision also was inspired, at least in part, by the American notion of Manifest Destiny, which provided the rhetorical justification for the United States to expand from a relatively thin strip of land along the Atlantic coast all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The Germanic vision of this impulse would have seen, at the very least, a genocide from the Vistula to the Urals, from the peninsula of Finnmark to the Caucasus Mountains.
Once the National Socialists had Germanised and Germanified Europe, the Germans were to keep conquering in successive waves, eastward and westward, generation upon generation, until they had taken over the entire world. As the historian Gerhard Ludwig Weinberg is fond of putting it, what was expected to happen when the opposing waves German conquerors met up on the other side of the globe was not specified.
This was a great part of Germany’s vision for the future of the West — an entirely-Germanic Europe, a pacified (if not vassalised) North America in the immediate future, and, in the great sweep of history, a fully Aryan human race. This sounds obscene and outlandish to us now, even — or perhaps especially — to those of us with some eye for geopolitics and a cynical view of human nature, this sounds like pure propaganda.
But the National Socialists made no secret of most of these ambitions, both before and after they came to power in the final election of the Weimar Republic. And the fact remains that the Germans declared two very different wars, one against the Westerners they saw as Germaniseable, which they prosecuted mostly along the agreed-upon rules of warfare, and the other against the Slavs, whom they only viewed as worthy of turning into fertilizer and upon whom they practiced a barbarity rarely seen since before the Bronze Age. Concurrently with these two wars, the German state built a people-eating machine for the purpose of exterminating the non-Germans (and non-worthy Germans) within Germany and each of the lands it conquered, east and west.
This people-eating machine we remember as the Holocaust, which we have already discussed in the previous chapter. But its existence is worth repeating in the context of the full madness of National Socialism; for, had the Germans succeeded winning their wars in the West and in the East, they would not have stopped the machinery of the Holocaust once they had run out of Jews. On the contrary, the machines would have kept on humming, growing ever-more hungry for people to eat.
In my estimation, if Germany had somehow won the Second World War — or, more plausibly but still quite unlikelily, even if it had somehow forced the Soviet Union to capitulate and remained at war with the rest of the Allies — the people-eating machines would not have stopped until even the National Socialists had been fed to them and what remained of Europe’s people had descended into anarchy and civil war. In this unthinkable, impossible, reprehensible scenario, what once was known as the West would have suffered an annihilation even more complete than the one visited upon the millions of Jews and Slavs and Germans in our own time.
But this alternate history did not come to pass, and my suppositions had no chance of being tested by history, because of the strategic alliance between the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States — a union of Unions, as it were. This alliance was vital for how the broader European war unfolded, and each partner contributed to the defeat of the Germans in their own irreplaceable way.
As myths abounded within Germany during the rise of the National Socialists, so too have myths abounded amongst the Allied Powers after Germany was conquered and the National Socialists were overthrown. Great Britain believes that it has the greatest moral claim to victory, having declared war the soonest of the three and having suffered greatly from German bombs and a siege by German submarines; the United States believes that it beat them gall-durned Nazzies in hand-to-hand combat and thereby saved the world; and the descendants of the now-defunct Soviet Union believe that they drowned Germany in blood and steel without anybody’s help, and that they in turn were only stopped from spreading socialism to the Strait of Gibraltar by the perfidy of the capitalist pigs.
These myths are all false.
Though the Blitz visited ruin upon tens of tens of thousands of families and U-Boat warfare caused many Britons to suffer some significant measure of hardship, Britain’s contribution to the victory lay in the strength of its navy, the strategic breadth of its still-extant empire, and the defensibility of its home islands against German invasion by sea and air.
The Americans, rather than simply rolling over Western Europe in a liberating tide of democracy, rather played the role of quartermaster to the Britons and the Soviets as their lasting contribution to the defeat of the National Socialists. They remember themselves as the Arsenal of Democracy, and they were, at least in part; their deliveries of planes and tanks to Great Britain helped to bomb many German cities into utter ruin. And, make no mistake, nearly two hundred thousand Americans gave their lives — and a further 350,000 sacrificed their bodies — in combat across North Africa and Italy and France and the Low Countries and Germany. This sacrifice was certainly not for nothing, not only for the direct casualties it exacted upon the Germans and their allies, but especially for the post-war borders of Western Europe.
But the most significant American contribution to the victory was in their material support of the Soviet Union. Measured by US dollar value, the Soviet Union received more Lend-Lease aid than any other country except for Britain, and while the nominal dollar amount to Britain was three times greater than that to the Soviet Union, not all Lend-Lease dollars were equal. In particular, a great portion of British-bound dollars were wrapped up in expensive machines of war — in planes and ships and tanks, and the ammunition and fuel and oil and spare parts required to keep these machines in deadly working order.
The United States also supplied planes and armoured vehicles by the thousands to the Soviet Union, yet the best part of Allied aid was accounted for in cheaper supplies — with civilian trucks, with railroad engines and cars, with many tonnes of food, clothing, and raw materials that fed Soviet bellies and Soviet industry. In all, Lend-Lease delivered about 17.5 million tons of supplies to the Soviet Union over the course of the war, nearly as much as the United States delivered to supply its own army in Europe over the course of its operations.
These supplies freed up millions of Soviet men (and tens of thousands of women) to fight who would otherwise have been required in agriculture or industry, and allowed millions of women to work in heavy industry to produce many more Soviet weapons of war. With these supplies and the men they bought, the Soviets armed and equipped reserve armies they used to replenish the millions upon millions of casualties and prisoners of war the Germans inflicted upon the Red Army. Thus the Soviet Union did indeed drown the Germans in steel and blood — with a great amount of that steel forged by Soviet women from American iron, and much of that blood fortified by American grain delivered on American transports.
It is impossible to say, of course, whether the Soviet Union would have ultimately prevailed without this aid; it is a fact that the Soviet Union increasingly relied on Lend-Lease every year until the last year of the war, after the war’s conclusion was foregone. It should therefore not be doubted that Lend-Lease significantly shortened the length of time it took the Red Army to defeat the Wehrmacht, time that the Wehrmacht and the death squads and death camps that followed in its wake would have used to extract untold destruction upon the peoples of Eastern Europe.
I should emphasise here that this analysis is not designed to cheapen the loss of lives and the destruction of households incurred on the Americans, nor by the British, nor even the French before and after their defeat in 1941. If you ever get the chance, I suggest you visit the British War Cemetery in the former British sector of Berlin. If you ever walk amongst the tombstones, be sure to mark some of the names and ages of the men who were there laid to rest. Many of them are clustered, presumably into the crews they were serving; most of these men are in their twenties or thirties, and a fair few are teenagers — boys, and men, called by their country to give their lives in the skies over Germany. Their deaths, as with the Americans and the French and the partisans, should not be forgotten.
These men did not die in vain, but their sacrifice alone did not defeat the Germans, and we would also do well to remember how the German Army truly was defeated. As it stands, it took about 27 million Soviet lives, civilians and soldiers, to drive the Germans from the siege of Leningrad and the centre of Stalingrad and the outskirts of Moscow, all the way back to Berlin. And it is imperative to understand that, without the material support of the United States and the rest of the Anglosphere, this horrendous pile of corpses would have been far higher before the war came to a decision. It is possible that the Soviets would have prevailed, even if it had cost 30 or 35 or 40 million lives — a price which the National Socialists would have happily extracted all the way to the war’s conclusion, whatever that conclusion would have been.
But it is at least as likely that, without Lend-Lease and related aid from its allies, the Soviet Union would have been forced to capitulate, leaving most of its territory west of the Urals at the mercy of the National Socialists — who famously had no mercy even for their own people, much less for the Slavs of the Steppe. And then, regardless of whether the Americans could have defeated the Germans in Europe and overthrown the National Socialists, hundreds of millions of Europeans would have been sacrificed to the death cult’s Aryan madness, and many of the great cities of Europe (and possibly even a few metropoles in North America) would almost certainly have been devastated by nuclear weapons. In any case, the war’s end would have come years later, with even more dire consequences for the West and the world.
As it happened, the war concluded with the complete conquest of Germany and the unconditional surrender of its government, an event almost unique in the history of modern warfare. This conquest came with the evisceration and immiseration of the German people — of das Volk, the very concept of which is now and will likely forever more be associated with fanatical madmen who murdered tens of millions of Europeans in a desperate gambit to earn the right to murder billions more human beings the world over. Not counting the German victims of the Holocaust, eight million Germans wound up giving their own lives to the cult of National Socialism, and upwards of two million German women were raped by Red Army soldiers — often serially, often many times over many days, and not a few of them to death.
In the war’s closing months and the years following the National Socialist defeat, fourteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from Eastern Europe, depopulating vast stretches of Prussian territory east of the Oder and erasing centuries of German participation in all of the cultures from the Baltic States to the Black Sea.
Beyond this, German cities and towns and villages beyond the counting were bombed to ruin — often, though hardly always, with a patina of strategic justification that nevertheless excused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and the piecewise destruction of more than a thousand years of accumulated heritage. More than one serious military and political leader proposed completely dissolving the German polity, both to avenge the fallen and to prevent the Germans from rising again to threaten the world for a third time.
The political entity of Prussia was dissolved, a scapegoat saddled with the tainted legacy of German militarism that had led to such horrors. Prussia will never exist again, outside of the hearts of a scant few people in Brandenburg and Berlin. Some Allied policymakers even went so far as to propose sterilising the whole of the surviving Germans, as a sort of Final Solution to the German Question.
In the end Germany was split into two, into East and West, as was Europe itself. The erection of the Berlin Wall saw the eastern border of West Germany form the first hard border of the West in its long and storied history, a border eventually kept with barbed wire and machine guns and mines tipped with nuclear warheads that we call the Iron Curtain.
Unlike the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union had little interest in participating in the West — in playing the Westphalian game or dancing to the Concert of Europe or whatever other order would come to rule the minds of the men who lived in the troublesome peninsula on the western edge of the Soviets’ vast empire. Instead, the Soviet Union asserted itself as a counterweight and competitor to the United States, and as the master of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
By a common conspiracy of chauvinism and machismo, the powers on each side of this new border politely ignored the many war crimes they had committed in pursuit of their victory, as well as the mutual aid they had given and received in order to secure it. To this day, Americans insist their forefathers defeated the German Army in the field, while Russians believe their ancestors could have marched to the English Channel and beyond if it hadn’t been for D-Day.
That the Wehrmacht was broken in the East after sustaining millions of casualties and dealing out millions more, and that the Soviets themselves insisted that a second front be opened from which the Americans could threaten German soil proper — notwithstanding the conquest of the Italian Peninsula — have been all but forgotten in our collective memory of this conflict.
As we all well know, the United States emerged from the Second World War as the most powerful empire in the history of the world, having learned that Europe could not be left to its own devices without risking the periodic immolation of tens of millions of lives to the prejudices, bloodlusts, and revenges of the Old Continent. It settled the German Question by turning West Germany into a vassal state; rather than impose ruinous war reparations upon an already-ruined country, the United States invested in that country’s reconstruction, making it something between a vassal and an ally. Notably, and contrary to popular belief in the Anglosphere, this was not charity; the Marshall Plan was an investment, and it was one the Federal Republic of Germany paid back, with interest. The final such payment occurred in 2013, which was celebrated in a then-reunited Germany but passed unremarked upon in the United States or the wider West.
This story, in the broadest of strokes, is how we got here. This is the story of how the West came to take the shape with which we are familiar today. There are many details I have omitted — including the millions of deaths the United States’ imperial ambitions facilitated in Southeast Asia and across Central and South America in the years between the construction and the demolition of the Berlin Wall — which deserve their own consideration, but which have little to do with the legal, political, and cultural milieu in which we have grown up.
The new milieu was established by the United States and the United Kingdom in 1944, codified in the so-called Bretton Woods Agreement, which established a common financial framework amongst the Anglosphere, and between the Anglosphere and Western Europe. This common financial system, and the legal authority and political cooperation which underpinned it, was the basis of the long peace that has reigned in the West since 1945.
In the next, and final, installment of this introductory series, we will explore the contemporary West as I have known it, as well as some observations about our current moment and speculations about where we might be headed, as the long peace initiated by Bretton Woods seems to be coming to an end.