Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

Such an approach certainly has its limits. The case of WWII is different.
Its end is too recent. In Eastern Europe, it actually ended
only in the 1990s when Soviet troops left the Baltic States, East
Germany and Poland. So its memory is still very much alive. But
WWII is also different from WWI because of its very nature. It was
not a war of comparable nationalisms. It was the war of democracy
against the Nazi totalitarianism. And the specific character of the
Nazi ideology, based as it was on anti-Semitism and racism, caused
the unprecedented horror of this war, which we must qualify as ultimate
evil – there is no another word for it. Nevertheless, we must
somehow try to pacify the memory wars originating from this period.
In order to attain this objective, we have to look at it from a point of
view that makes it possible not to carry past conflicts to the present
and the future. We must, on the contrary, replace it by a common
remembrance of past horrors meant as a step towards an
intellectual and moral reconciliation. This is the point of view of the
victims of war. We must also try to change national identities by reducing
or even eliminating the traditional picture of the enemy, often
still an important element. Every European nation has incorporated
in its identity an image of the hereditary enemy. This can change in
the course of time – for the French, the British were replaced by the
Germans – but it plays an important role in the image that a nation
has of itself. We must learn to think of WWII not in national, but in
ideological terms. We must learn to see it as a war of democracy
against Nazi totalitarianism.
When we do this a major difficulty appears, because the ally of
democracies like the US and the UK was the Soviet Union. The nature
of the political regime of the USSR becomes therefore crucially
important to our vision of WWII. Let me, however, restate very
briefly my position: I maintain that Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union
was indeed a totalitarian country and that it may rightly be compared
to fascist Italy or to Nazi Germany. But this does not imply
that those who chose the side of the Nazis against the Soviets were
politically and morally entitled to do that. It does not mean that those
who chose the Soviets against the Nazis made the right choice.
The only correct choice was democracy. For many, if not for most
inhabitants of Eastern Europe, this option was in reality not possible.
We have to understand the tragedy of people who were
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