Contra Yglesias on World War Two Revisionism

Why British Lives Matter and Fighting Unwinable Wars Is Bad

Matt Yglesias loves what defeating Nazi Germany did for American race relations. “It’s officially not okay to be a racist after World War Two . . . nobody says they are racist.” Not only can you not hate Black people or support segregation, respectable Americans also have to walk on eggshells when discussing race. “You’re not supposed to say things that are hateful or mean or inaccurate, but, beyond that, you’re supposed to maintain a broad safety margin around overt stereotyping.” It’s perfectly okay if this taboo means sticking your head in the sand: “I have not looked into [why so many professional basketball players are black], and frankly I don’t intend to, because I am happy to live in a society where it is considered unseemly and inappropriate.”

Yglesias is undoubtedly correct that the Final Solution discredited racism and dealt a heavy blow to Jim Crow. But he doesn’t stop on this solid ground. Instead, he views debates about strategic decisions at the beginning of World War II through the crooked lens of American race relations. He even admits this: “These popular historiographical disputes are really about the present rather than the past,” he proclaims. Really? Yglesias is so focused on present-day U.S. discourse that it’s hard to extract his exact thesis about World War Two. The closest he comes is “trying to problematize Winston Churchill and normalize Hitler while destabilizing the pop culture consensus that Nazis are bad is an effective way” of arguing most Jews are not decent.

But one can, in fact, be curious about the grand strategy of World War Two. One might even think the U.S. today is much like Britain in the 1930s—facing a surging opponent not fully recovered from dynastic collapse but bursting with potential strength. One might even think the deaths of Britain’s subjects a tragedy and the loss of her empire a crushing blow to national morale.

Yglesias’ claim that people discussing history are really talking about the present is strange. He enjoys playing with history, having written dozens of alternative histories about what would have happened under plausible counterfactuals. He’s written alternate histories where Hillary never married Bill Clinton, where the South won the Civil War, and where the Nazis won World War Two. He obviously enjoys thinking about history and toying with cause and effect.

However, when it comes to World War Two, Yglesias wants everyone to get in line and uphold the consensus that Hitler was the ultimate moral evil. Worrying about British strategic overreach is not allowed and means you’re probably antisemitic.

Having lovingly detailed his political commitments, Yglesias reserves most of his ire for a revisionist take on World War Two first suggested by Pat Buchanan. I haven’t read Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, and I’m not sure Yglesias has either. Thank goodness for Chat GPT. “Buchanan contends that British policies towards Germany in both world wars escalated conflicts unnecessarily, ultimately undermining European stability. He criticizes Churchill for rejecting peaceful alternatives, notably appeasement, and suggests Hitler initially sought limited, rather than global, ambitions.” Yglesias thinks this historical take “resulted in the final marginalization of a once mainstream conservative figure who had spent the prior decades becoming increasingly marginal.” Get in line on World War Two strategy or else!

Matt’s followers largely agree. I was recently called a “pitiful festering pustule” after I questioned Matt’s support for post-war taboos on racial discourse. Thirty people liked this comment. I’ve been called similar things for questioning whether Britain should have gone to war when Germany attacked Poland in 1939. I’m writing this essay to share my views on British strategy in 1939. My views are my own, and I’m not defending Buchanan or anyone else.

Analyzing Britain’s grand strategy requires figuring out what British policymakers knew and didn’t know when the war began. By summer 1939, Nazi Germany had already broken the Treaty of Versailles. It had remilitarized the Rhineland, combined with Austria, and annexed Czechoslovakia. Hitler sought to annex the Free City of Danzig, a major German-speaking port that had been part of Prussia for centuries before the Treaty of Versailles. Britain correctly suspected Danzig was only the beginning of his demands. Nazi archives make it clear Hitler wanted to annex all of Poland, or at least partition it with Russia.

Too weak to project force past the Danish straits and into the Baltic Sea, Britain tried to get Russia to guarantee the independence of Poland. Stalin had other ideas. On August 23, 1939, Germany and Russia entered a nonaggression pact whereby each promised to protect the other against attack. This agreement contained secret protocols, carving Eastern Europe into spheres of influence where either Germany or the USSR would have a free hand. Germany got western Poland and Lithuania, while the Soviet Union got eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and the Romanian province of Bessarabia. Britain and France didn’t learn about the secret protocols until after the war began. On September 1, 1939, Germany launched a full-scale invasion of Poland, and it became clear that Hitler’s ambitions extended far beyond Danzig. Stalin, who was better than Hitler at managing appearances and finding the path of least resistance, didn’t invade until September 17.

British policymakers were terrified of German bombing. In the First World War, planes were too underpowered to carry many bombs and lacked the range to go far behind enemy lines. By 1939, German planes could bomb London from bases on German soil. In 1937, the British Committee on Imperial Defense concluded that a 60-day bombing campaign could cause 600,000 civilian deaths and 1.2 million civilian injuries. Britain invested heavily in its air force and air defenses, and the Royal Air Force’s budget exceeded that of the Royal Navy from 1938 through the end of the war. Britain also remembered that 880,000 British and Commonwealth troops had died in World War One and another 2 million had been injured. Military casualties would come more slowly than civilian casualties and would only reach such levels if war went on for years. In any event, British policymakers in 1939 sincerely thought hundreds of thousands of British civilians would die even in a short war with Germany.

By 1939, Nazi antisemitism was obvious. Jews had been forbidden from marrying Gentiles and excluded from professions. In November 1938, a nationwide, coordinated pogrom called Kristallnacht took place. In two days, 91 Jews were murdered, thousands of Jewish businesses were destroyed, and roughly 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. This happened at a time when racial violence was widespread. Between 1920 and 1922, 163 Black Americans died in lynchings. The most lethal pogroms before the invasion of Poland had happened in Russia: the Odessa pogrom (1905) killed 400–800 Jews, the Kiev pogrom (1906) killed 100–200 Jews, and the Bialystok pogrom (1906) killed 70–200 more—all during or immediately after the Russo-Japanese War. Kristallnacht was novel not for lethal violence against Jews, but for its central planning and Teutonic efficiency. Racial violence in America and Russia was more organic, often unleashed by the demons of war.

Even though pre-war German pogroms were less lethal than American lynchings or their Russian equivalent, Yglesias implies that British policymakers should have seen Nazis as the ultimate moral evil as early as September 1, 1939. Yglesias doesn’t really offer a sharp critique of revisionist accounts of the origins of World War Two, because he’s too busy celebrating post-World War Two American racial norms. He admits that Britain lacked the military capacity to defend Poland but is glad it tried and failed. He’s worried that those who feel otherwise are part of a sinister racist project, claiming:

The revisionist critique operates on two levels

1. You need to revise the moral judgment that the Nazis were a kind of ultimate evil against which even Stalin is a preferable ally.

2. You need to revise the pragmatic judgment Britain reached after Munich that no modus vivendi was possible and that his promises were worthless.

Matt’s first point is baldly ahistorical. When Germany invaded Poland, it had engaged in less antisemitic violence than late imperial Russia. The number of Jews killed in pre-war Nazi Germany was smaller than the number of Blacks lynched in Warren Harding’s America. It was far smaller than the number of Indians Britain itself killed during the Amritsar Massacre. Japan had butchered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the preceding decade. In other words, Nazi antisemitism was ugly, but it wasn’t some freakish outlier by the standards of the time. Nothing Nazi Germany had done before 1939 suggested that protecting Jewish lives should override normal strategic considerations, like avoiding military defeat and preventing the slaughter of British troops and civilians. Any moral theory demanding Britain go to war in 1939 to protect German Jews would also require the United States today to declare war on China to protect the Uighurs. History doesn’t have to become a philosemitic morality play.

Even if Britain’s top priority had been protecting Jews from Nazis, declaring war on Germany did the opposite. Because Britain couldn’t put boots on the ground east of the Rhine, it couldn’t protect Central and Eastern European Jews. It could only unleash the demons of a broader war. Going to war raised the likelihood of massacres, and over six million Jews were eventually murdered after Britain’s performative attempt to defend Poland. Britain could have saved more lives by allowing Jewish immigration into Britain, compensating Australia and Canada for accepting Jewish refugees, and declaring India open to Jewish immigrants. Unfortunately for Yglesias, those actions wouldn’t have revolutionized American race relations.

Matt’s second point ignores the possibility of a wait-and-see approach. On September 1, 1939, the British cabinet didn’t need to decide whether a modus vivendi with Germany was possible, just whether it should declare war immediately. Poland was indefensible, and Britain knew this. Her navy couldn’t realistically navigate the Danish Straits under German aerial and naval attack, nor could Britain project force inland. Britain never undertook a serious military effort to defend Poland.

On top of that, France wasn’t a reliable ally. In the late 1930s, the French right openly opposed rearmament. In 1938, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet told the Chamber of Deputies that France should abandon Eastern European alliances that could draw her into war “when French security is not directly threatened.” He privately indicated he wanted to walk back security guarantees but was constrained by other cabinet members. Had Hitler pursued broader European conquest, voices like Bonnet’s would have been discredited, making France more steadfast. In World War One, French troops stood fast at Verdun while taking greater casualties than any previous army in Western history, but later mutinied when ordered to attack German positions. A sharp observer would’ve known France would fight more cohesively and effectively to defend itself than to fight a war ostensibly on behalf of Poland. The idea that French lives were being sacrificed for Poland killed the poilu’s morale. In any event, instead of waiting for a war it could win, Britain went to war expecting hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, with an ally whose foreign minister wanted peace, and a navy incapable of projecting power beyond the Skagerrak.

A wait-and-see approach would have worked better. By summer 1939, Britain was already beefing up its military. In 1938, defense spending was around 7.4 percent of GDP, lower than America’s early Cold War levels. By mid-1939, defense spending had doubled. Hitler’s invasion of Poland would have galvanized the British public even more, and Britain could have built up its navy and air force while Germany was fighting a land war.

The decision to declare war in September 1939 and keep fighting after Warsaw fell ranks among Britain’s worst strategic errors. It was partly redeemed by an even bigger German mistake. In 1939, it was fairly likely that Germany and the USSR would eventually come to blows, given their opposing ideologies and simultaneous arms buildups. Rapid U.S. assistance was unlikely, as America had neutrality laws designed to avoid getting dragged into European conflicts. Most Americans felt that U.S. involvement in World War I had been a mistake. Ultimately, Britain was only saved because Hitler inexplicably declared war on the U.S. after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Without that, America would have focused on the Pacific, leaving Britain and the USSR starved of vital resources. Britain might have held out behind her navy, but Russia would likely have folded without American materiel. In any event, Hitler would have had even more time for the Final Solution, and fewer Jews would have survived the Holocaust.

Yglesias is glad “the idea that Nazis were really bad became a cornerstone of the moral order that emerged in the late 1940s.” Nazis were barbaric, and realizing this improved American race relations. However, the claim that Nazis were materially worse than Stalinists flows from the historiographical limits of the 1940s and gratitude for Russia’s help as a war-time ally. The liberation of concentration camps gave the world photographic proof of Nazi crimes, and the Nuremberg trials publicly documented their atrocities. Nazi archives were thrown open to historians eager to make sure Nazi atrocities never happened again. Meanwhile, Stalin’s crimes stayed hidden. Soviet gulags were never liberated by Allied troops, NKVD officers were never put on trial for war crimes like murdering most of the Polish officer corps, Russian soldiers were never tried for raping millions of German women, and Soviet archives were closed to Western historians until 1990. Not revising judgments about World War II after one of the major belligerent’s archives was thrown open is historiographic malpractice.

Stalin’s policies killed around 7 to 9 million Russians before World War Two even started: about a million in purges, another million in gulags, and 5 to 7 million in famines caused by forced collectivization. Stalin was nearly as committed to liquidating class enemies as Hitler was to exterminating Jews. He was a bit more pragmatic because there weren’t many proletarian engineers or scientists, so waging war required him to make temporary compromises. Hitler wasn’t trying to liquidate the German middle class, so he didn’t need Jewish professionals the way Stalin needed ex-middle-class scientists and engineers. In 1939, Europe had about two “class enemies” for every Jew. If Stalin had completed his plan to eliminate the bourgeoisie, the death toll could’ve exceeded the Final Solution. Moreover, Stalin’s territorial ambitions were as vast and sanguinary as Hitler’s. He seized eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and parts of Finland, and, after defeating Germany, held all of Eastern Europe and even East Germany under communist rule. If there were an Olympic event for worst Western ruler in history, Stalin would give Hitler a real run for his money.

Unfortunately, pointing out communist atrocities doesn’t help Yglesias win arguments about American race relations. Calling conservatives who question the post-war moral consensus Nazi apologists does. Yglesias is right that MAGA and the alt-right threaten American liberty more than modern-day communists. But MAGA isn’t the biggest threat to American lives. Every year, China grows stronger, building a hundred times more ships than America, while producing more cars, drones, and steel. Within my lifetime, the U.S. might have to decide whether to fight Chinese expansion or acquiese. Valorizing unwinnable wars is a lot more dangerous than using less sensitive language about race.

Britain’s 1939 decision to go to war was strategically flawed, both given what policymakers knew then and what we know now. The war cost 451,000 British lives, brought a decade of strict rationing, and reduced Britain to a second-rate power. It did nothing to prevent the Nazis from butchering two-thirds of Europe’s Jews and may have sped that up. The war left Eastern Europe under communist domination for over forty years. If thinking this was a policy failure makes me an edgelord, so be it. I think it’s just moderate pacifism and common sense.