December 28, 2017
Volume 46 - No. 52
By Matthew Fabritius
As we approach the end of the holiday season, we not only are entering into the typical uncharted territory that every New Year brings, but are also soon approaching the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, which anniversary we’ll see in 2020.
The Second World War was not simply another war in the history of nation states vying for land and power, it was the bloodiest conflict in the entire history of the human race. Unprecedented destruction claimed the lives of almost one hundred million people, mostly across China, Russia and continental Europe. While World War I was frequently referred to as “The Great War” or the “War to End all Wars,” World War II promptly stole that title away from its predecessor with unbridled territorial expansion and extermination campaigns not seen since Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great conquered the harsh desert steppes of mainland Asia. This conflict has of course become particularly commercialized in the ahistorical cultural vacuum we have inhabited in the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Millennial Americans’ consumerist attitudes combined with digital advancements in technology have allowed for mass commercialization of the horrors of World War II with a giant slew of video games, movies and television shows covering the course of the war. While a scant few of these mass media productions like publisher Activision’s 2008 video game Call of Duty: World at War or the 2007 Austrian film The Counterfeiters are predominantly accurate and follow the general historical outline of the war, most others promote a central lie in regards to American involvement in World War II.
This ‘central lie’ is the idea that United States’ military involvement in World War II was the primary reason for the downfall of the Third Reich and strategic destruction of the German military. This false narrative, which I refer to as the “Normandy Myth,” is supported by an unending litany of productions The The Paper Paper -- 760.747.7119 760.747.7119
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in the vein of Spielberg’s landmark 1998 film Saving Private Ryan and video games titles like Activision’s 2017 Call of Duty: WW2.
These American entertainment titles promote the tired canard that the June 1944 American DDay invasion off of the French Atlantic Wall, officially referred to as Operation Overlord, was the knockout blow that destroyed the German Wehrmacht and in effect toppled Hitler’s once dominant European empire. The Normandy Myth has also been
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used to tangential effect in the post-war cultural atmosphere of the United States to justify American military involvements in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan by harkening back to the overly-romanticized American liberation of France in the wake of Overlord’s operational success. The reason for this historical misconception is incredibly simple. The Normandy Myth suggests a “clean end” to World War II that is far more romantic than the reality of how the war actually ended. Westerners general-
ly avoid giving credit to the Soviet Union’s military forces for decisively ending the war in Europe against the Nazis as it would feed into a heroic endorsement of not only Joseph Stalin as the genocidal leader of the Soviet Union, but also into the notion of communism as a morally laudable philosophical ideology. While Overlord was clearly an American victory over German forces, it was a marginal part of the war as whole. This may be difficult for many Americans to believe given the event’s signifi-
Did America Really Defeat the Nazis? Continued on Page 2