Chapter 8: The “Good War”: Complexities of WWII and the Cold War

No historical event is more central to the Anglophone world’s self-image than the Second World War. It is the “Good War,” a clear-cut battle between the forces of freedom and democracy on one side and fascism and tyranny on the other. The subsequent Cold War is presented in similarly stark terms: a “long twilight struggle” between the free world, led by the United States, and the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union.

While there is no denying the monstrous evil of the Nazi regime or the oppressive nature of Soviet communism, this simple narrative of good versus evil is another form of historical whitewashing. It conveniently ignores the deep moral complexities and hypocrisies that were at the heart of the Anglophone war effort and its aftermath.

This chapter will challenge the “Good War” narrative by exploring several inconvenient truths:

• An Alliance of Empires: The Allied powers that fought against the Axis were not a league of free nations. The British Empire was the largest empire in world history, and it fought the war, in large part, to preserve its colonial possessions. The United States was a segregated, Jim Crow nation that practiced its own form of racial apartheid. The story of the war is often told as a fight for a freedom that the Allies denied to hundreds of millions of people within their own borders and colonies.
• The Pacific War as a Colonial Conflict: The war in the Pacific is often framed as a simple case of Japanese aggression. This ignores the context: it was also a clash between an established Western colonial power (the US in the Philippines, the British in Malaya and Burma, the Dutch in Indonesia) and a rising non-Western imperial power (Japan) for control of Asia. For many of the colonized peoples of Asia, it was not a war of liberation, but a war to determine which master would rule them.
• The Forgotten Armies: The narrative of the “Good War” is almost exclusively white. It celebrates the British at Dunkirk, the Americans at Normandy, and the Australians at Kokoda. This story systematically erases the immense contributions of colonial troops. The British Indian Army, for example, grew to 2.5 million men, the largest volunteer army in history, and was crucial in the fights in North Africa, Italy, and Burma. Hundreds of thousands of African soldiers, like the French Tirailleurs Sénégalais, also fought and died for their colonial rulers. Their bravery and sacrifice have been almost entirely written out of the popular story of the war.
• Cold War “Freedom Fighters”: During the Cold War, the United States’ opposition to the Soviet Union led it to support a gallery of brutal, anti-democratic dictators, death squads, and terrorist groups around the world, as long as they were anti-communist. In the name of “freedom,” the CIA orchestrated coups against democratically elected governments (in Iran, Guatemala, Chile), armed the groups that would later become the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and backed murderous regimes throughout Latin America.

By re-examining these celebrated conflicts, we are not diminishing the real sacrifices made to defeat fascism. Instead, we are painting a more honest and complete picture. We are revealing that even in its most righteous moments, the Anglophone world’s actions were deeply entangled with the preservation of empire, the politics of race, and a cynical willingness to betray its own stated ideals to maintain geopolitical power.