The Great World War 2 Afterparty is over

Our ancestors bought us eighty years of peace, institutional effectiveness, and moral clarity. But nothing lasts forever.

Photo by U.S. Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons

My father’s father was a bombardier in Europe in World War 2. Around Christmas in 2002, I asked him to tell me everything he remembered about the war. I had always had great reverence for my grandparents’ generation, and growing up I pestered them for as many of their stories as they could tell me. But the war, and especially combat itself, had been the one thing I avoided asking about directly; instead, it simply loomed silently in the background, defining and giving meaning to everything.

But my other grandfather, who had been an infantryman in the Pacific, had died a few years prior, and had taken most of his dark secrets with him to the grave — why he couldn’t see certain objects without throwing up, or the nature of the secret wound that had earned him his “extra” purple heart. I told my remaining grandfather I didn’t want to let his own stories perish completely. So he sat down with me in his living room and told me every story he could remember. We talked all night and into the morning.

The picture I got of the war from those stories was far from the glossy cartoon version of World War 2 that we learn from popular culture. It was full of foolish mistakes and gross incompetence, casual brutality, petty vice. Most of all what I realized was how confused everyone was. The one line my grandfather repeated, over and over, was “For all we knew, we were going to die the next day!” When we hear the story of World War 2 now, we know how everything turned out — what the ultimate conclusion was, what the important battles were, and so on. We’ve had time to turn it into a coherent narrative. But at the time, the people fighting that tremendous conflict had very little idea what was actually going on, or how it would all turn out.

By convention, we call my grandparents’ generation the Greatest Generation, and though it’s a bit cheesy, it was precisely that utter confusion that made them deserve the moniker. In 1932, there had never been an economic downturn like the Great Depression¹; nobody knew whether capitalism was permanently collapsing, but they kept on going to work every day. In 1942 nobody knew whether the Nazi and Japanese empires would conquer Eurasia, enslave its people, and use its vast resources to cow the United States into submission — but they didn’t flinch from the task of beating those enemies back.

With smug hindsight, we now know that capitalism is largely self-correcting, and that the Allies could easily outproduce the Axis. Imagine getting up every day to fight, or work in a factory, not knowing any of that, and yet knowing that as long as it took, and as hard as it got, you would keep fighting. There was a saying in the early days of the war: “Golden Gate in ‘48, bread line in ‘49.” That’s how long Americans expected the war to last, and what they expected the cost to be.

That generation left us an inheritance so priceless that we will never really appreciate its value. For decades, our world was free of great-power conflict, and that long period of relative stability brought unprecedented economic growth. The war brought the end of the age of European empires, self-determination for Asia and Africa, and the long fall of global inequality and extreme poverty. It brought us the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It brought us an age of wonders — the computer revolution, the atomic age and the space age, modern health care, the age of Big Science.

Like my grandparents’ lives, World War 2 silently loomed in the background of the entire American Century. Talking all night with my grandfather, what I came to understand was that he and his generation — their pain, their sacrifice, their confusion, and their stubborn perseverance — were still watching over us, still protecting us and guiding us. Our happy, carefree modern lives — the paid vacation, the startup exits, the casual sex, the dance music festivals, the stock market, the psychedelic drugs, all of it — was an inheritance they fought to bequeath to us.

And now they are gone. The Greatest Generation has largely passed, and at the same time, we are discovering that some of those precious inheritances have been spent down. The moral anchor of the victory over the Axis has been largely lost. The Arsenal of Democracy, which endured throughout the Cold War, has been strangled by institutional sclerosis and ceded to China.

We’ve lived all our lives in the Great World 2 Afterparty, and now that party is over.

The evil of the Nazis is no longer our moral anchor

General George Patton’s nickname was “Old Blood and Guts”. He was no stranger to violence. And yet when he walked into the Nazi death camp at Ohrdruf, Patton reportedly vomited in horror, describing the camp as “one of the most appalling I have ever seen.” Eisenhower agreed, writing:

The other day I visited a German internment camp. I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world! It was horrible.

When he liberated Buchenwald later, Patton forced over a thousand local German civilians to come look at the sight, to behold and reckon with the evil they had supported.

Eisenhower famously ordered U.S. troops to tour Ohrdruf, saying “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for; now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” He understood that those atrocities would serve as a moral anchor that would give meaning to Americans’ struggle. And so it did; when they went home, Americans remembered what they had seen.

That moral anchor long outlasted the fighting. The whole modern notion of human rights, enshrined in the UN Charter and various international declarations, was in large part a reaction to the horrors perpetrated by the Axis. This necessarily involved some degree of whitewashing of the Allies’ own war crimes.² But the moral tally is unambiguous. The kind of systematic mass slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis and the Japanese Army was something unseen since the days of premodern conquerors like Tamerlane or Genghis Khan.

Adolf Hitler, in particular, was the all-time champion of genocide — the Holocaust is only the best-publicized part of his rampage, with Jews being perhaps only a quarter of his victims. And had they not been defeated by the Allies, the Axis would have just kept on killing and killing — Hitler’s explicit plan was to murder over 60 million more Slavs in order to make room for German expansion, and it’s unlikely he would have stopped with the Slavs.