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World War II best remembered as victory for humanity’s higher moral ideals
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THE participation of China’s honor guard in the May 9th parade in Moscow marking the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War made headlines around the world.
For some observers, this is an occasion to reflect on the Sino-Soviet cooperation in fighting fascism in WWII.
At a recent forum held by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Chinese and Russian experts discussed the traumatic impact of the war on their respective national psyches as well as the legacies of their wartime solidarity.
While it is well-known that the Soviet Union was the largest provider of military aid to China — up until 1941 — during China’s war against Japanese aggression, the history of Soviet soldiers fighting alongside their Chinese counterparts remains largely obscure, said Su Zhiliang, dean of the Humanities and Communications College of Shanghai Normal University.
For example, during the Battle of Wuhan, a large-scale confrontation waged in 1938 in areas around Hubei’s Provincial capital, Soviet air power helped repel an offensive launched by invading Japanese troops, Su told the forum. In Su’s opinion, these Soviet airmen are unsung heroes, since the Soviet Union wasn’t officially at war with Japan at the time and they were fighting as volunteers.
Newly declassified archives also demonstrate that Japan’s Kwantung Army stationed in northeastern China had spied on Russian citizens living along the Sino-Russian borders and later forcibly relocated them to the inland Nenjiang Plain, due to fears they might engage in “espionage” activities. This is evidence that both Russian and Chinese people were victims of fascist Japan, said Su.
And for most Russians, their memories of the war are primarily about the country’s resistance to Nazi invasion.
In the country’s collective psyche, there is not a single Russian household whose ancestors hadn’t fought the Nazis or suffered the tragic consequences of the war, said Irina Glebova, senior researcher at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences at Russian Academy of Sciences.
Collective memories of the war shouldn’t — and won’t — fade even though many veterans have died, said Glebova.
She argued that from 1941 to 1942, Soviet citizens stood on the brink of catastrophe as a string of military defeats at the hands of the seemingly invincible Nazi forces made subjugation seem imminent. Nonetheless, the cause of defending the motherland united different peoples and ethnic groups within the Soviet Union and strengthened their shared identity.
No matter how the world changes, memories of that national struggle against foreign invasion must not be sullied by revisionist portrayals of the Red Army as “perpetrators,” claimed Glebova.
Standing up to fascism together
According to Yu Weiping, a professor at East China Normal University, the war didn’t just unite the disparate peoples of the Soviet Union. As it escalated, it galvanized the whole world to set aside their self-interests and stand up to fascism together.
It turned out that no country could be insulated from what was to become the most devastating war in human history, and the only way the Allied nations could vanquish their enemies was to cooperate in a way that transcended a calculating, profit-or-loss mentality, Yu noted.
This distinguished WWII from WWI, which was fundamentally a war among imperial powers vying for colonies, spheres of influence and domination.
Yu observed that WWII was fought, from the Allied perspective, for the sake of such noble notions as morality, humanity and civilization.
Such notions are at the core of the war crime trials held in the aftermath of WWII, including the Nuremberg trials and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East — popularly known as the Tokyo trials. These trials were based on new legal concepts like crime against peace and crime against humanity.
While right-wing Japanese nationalists frequently attack and dismiss the Tokyo Trial as “victor’s justice,” these clauses actually attest to a higher moral purpose than the thirst to exact revenge on warmongers and differ substantially with past war reparations imposed on the defeated, said Yu. He added that the biggest lesson WWII has taught subsequent generations is that to prevail over a common threat, it is necessary to transcend national interests.
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