Was World War II Woke Enough?

Imperialist Japan and Nazi Germany weren't the only powers interested in empires. Were there any good guys in World War II?

According to today’s world of “woke,” Hitler wasn’t the only bad guy.

“Being woke” started life in our post-modern world as vernacular for “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.” More recently in pop culture “woke” has morphed into a pejorative term. One grumpy camper claims, “[t]he term woke has rapidly come to encompass everything and anything conservatives don't like – anything and anyone they want to discredit.” That description ignores the fundamental concern of conservatives, “many people now interpret woke to be a way to describe people who would rather silence their critics than listen to them.”

Woke history, like the 1619 Project for instance, purports an alternative view of the past, that claims be beyond reproach, affirming a self-proclaimed unassailable contemporary political “truth,” that America is systemically racist and oppressive. Is that fair—or accurate—or just, just rewriting the past to comport to somebody’s present day politics?

Look what they are doing to the “good war,” claiming that the good guys were no better than the bad guys, describing the legacy of the West as just one long littany of systematic repression.

For starters, the woke generation did not invent this criticism. Denouncing the West as one giant imperialist project is a staple of Marxist doctrine. The new woke are just repackaging old ideas.

Of course there are contradictions between the West’s commitment to freedom and liberty and the legacy of their imperial projects. Even during the war the commonwealth nations, for instance, struggled to disentangle themselves from the idea of an Imperial Britain. For post-World War II generations, breaking with the British Empire was more than just embracing a unique national identity. It was also about shedding the embarrassment of an imperial project built on the back of oppressive dogmas.

So what we do we make of what really happened? Here is one take.

What’s wrong with just saying the British Empire was oppressive and racist? The problem with the impulse to abandon everything about the British Empire is that it embraces bygone days that never were. For sure, there are elements of racism in the history of the Anglo-sphere. There were also legitimate complaints over abuse and exploitation, (after all it was the British Empire that banned slavery, albeit after profiting from it), but to taint the whole war-effort with our contemporary notions of race skews our understanding of the times of this war.

History has few constants. Race is not one of them. The language of race is not consistent from one generation to the next (even woke doesn’t mean the same thing ten years down the line). The language of empire changes as well.

History has to be measured on its own merits.

In truth, the past is a messy place that does sit well in the present.

Was World War II a race war? No controversy in history is more muddled than the role of race. Empires, whether they included the formal colonies of Britain and France or America’s “informal” imperium (which extended throughout Latin America and into the Asia-Pacific), these empires were an admixture of unjust acts of subjugation and liberalizing initiatives (some well intended but wrong-headed, some inspiring and transformative).

Prevailing in World War II would, in practice, save the best and worst of these empires. However, what is undeniable is that the only major belligerent with a fully explicit, dedicated and murderous racist agenda was Nazi Germany. No other regime, not even Japan, came close to viewing World War II through such as extreme prism of an unrestrained race war.

British “race nationalism,” which was one clarion call in the fight against fascism, offers a case in point. It was the legions of the British Empire that Churchill called on, peoples of many creeds and ethnicity, summoned to defend the frontiers of freedom.

For a century and a half the British “peoples” served as much if not more as a geo-strategic construct used to knit peoples together than a rationale for oppressing one racial group at the expense of another. In 1914, a contemporary observer boasted, “no man white or black…debated the question [to go to war], no government, autonomous or imperially controlled, had any doubt to its duty….[i]nspired by the spirit of nationalism dominions and dependencies, animated by loyalty and affection, gave the best of their manhood and their wealth for the protection of Empire.” For sure, more than a little hyperbole saturated this summary of British attitudes.

Still, at its root, the British peoples stood as a complex political-cultural identity not a simple racial construct. This identity was rooted in the liberal principles of modern Britain. These Western ideals were reflected in documents like Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms address, the Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill, and United Nations declaration to which all of the Commonwealth acceded. All these documents echoed a genuine aspiration for liberty.

Even some of the empire’s most irreconcilable internal enemies recognized the positive dimension of Britain’s vision of victory. Renowned Indian intellectual, Rabindranath Tagore, a powerful voice for throwing off the rule of the Raj, in the last public address before his death in 1941, lauded what was truly best about British civilization. He praised Britain for “upholding the dignity of human relationships,” even as he lamented that British ideals “appeared to have no place in the British administration” of his country. Tagore made a distinction between the practice colonialism and the ideals of a virtuous people. There was virtue in the fight for freedom against the evil empires.

What is the legacy of the Imperial fight for freedom in World War II? As historian Niall Ferguson concludes, World War II did see imperialism at its worse, “but it was Japanese imperialism [and the Nazis], not British.” In contrast, others link Western imperialism and race in World War II as if they have discovered some dark hidden truth that explains everything.

Race and imperialism were among the many under currents swirling beneath the surface. Yet, the debate over what they represented was not consistent within nations—let alone across the global landscape. It is more than fair to say there were strands of racism in the Western way of war, but a distortion to view the war in the primarily through the prism of racism and imperialist squabbling.