By Xu Yinglu
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Standing at this important historical juncture, the world is looking back and reflecting on how to jointly safeguard the hard-won environment of peace, stability, and prosperity. However, with conflicts flaring up in certain hotspots and intensified international geopolitical rivalry in recent years, attempts to distort the history of WWII and falsify historical memory have never ceased.
The distortion of WWII history is no longer a purely academic debate or a so-called difference in memory, but has become a deliberate manipulation serving today's geopolitical struggles. For example, certain forces in the US and Europe are trying to erase the Soviet Union's significant contribution and immense sacrifices in defeating Nazi Germany, even going so far as to rewrite WWII history and whitewash Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators. The West's selective memory of WWII has become a tool for geopolitical rivalry, amounting to an act of arrogance and betrayal against historical truth.
For some time now, mainstream Western discourse has fallen into a Normandy-centered narrative trap when commemorating the WWII. Certain voices highlight the D-Day landings as the decisive turning point of the anti-fascist war, while deliberately downplaying or ignoring the decisive contributions made on other fronts. The ironclad fact that the Soviet Union sacrificed 27 million lives and countless wounded on the Eastern Front is now marginalized as a mere "footnote" under today's Western "political correctness."
In the East, right-wing forces in Japan still refuse to face up to their history of aggression, repeatedly attempting to whitewash the militarist invasions of the past, which continues to raise alarm among neighbouring Asian countries and their people. If, in the case of the European theatre, the West's historical manipulation often takes the form of distortion and "reinvention", then when it comes to the Eastern, they tend to simply look the other way, or even tolerate Japan's flawed historical perception out of the pragmatic need to win it over politically. The Chinese people, through the bloody war of resistance, pinned down and destroyed the vast majority of the Japanese militarist army's main forces. At the cost of more than 35 million lives lost and wounded, China made a decisive contribution to the final victory on the Eastern battlefield of the World Anti-Fascist War. Without the Chinese people's determined resistance, the history of Asia, and even the world, could well have been rewritten.
It is precisely for this reason that any "selective memory" or deliberate distortion of the history of WWII deserves condemnation by all who stand for international justice. "Western-centrism," lingering Cold War mindsets, and attempts to monopolise the narrative of WWII cannot change the historical truth. Any blatant revision of WWII history is a desecration of the sacrifice made by all those who fought against fascism, and a betrayal of people around the world. Such distortions cannot disguise or legitimize the interventionism or hegemonic actions of certain countries or forces today.
As the main theater of the Eastern front and a nation that made tremendous sacrifices, China fully understands the weight of this history, remains highly vigilant against any attempts to falsify it, and stands firm in opposing all acts that distort the truth about World War II. Much of today's international order is inseparably linked to the course and outcomes of World War II. If the international community wishes to uphold fairness and justice, it must resolutely defend the victory of the World Anti-Fascist War and reject any efforts to falsify that history or whitewash Nazi ideology and militarism. Only then can history serve as a bridge for reconciliation, rather than a source of new division.
(The author is a scholar of the Institute of Area Studies, Peking University.)
Editor's Note: Originally published on huanqiu.com, this article is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
