I thought I knew a lot about history, but I’ve been surprised by a new book called Year Zero, by Ian Buruma, a Dutch journalist. He takes the reader on a whirlwind and heart-wrenching tour of the world in 1945 – and the pent-up emotions of people and governments alike in that year.
The general American view of World War Two is that it was the last "Good war," an unambiguous triumph against two thoroughly bad enemies - after which came victory parades and grand material consumption.
In reality, it was a world of chaos, humiliation, starvation, revenge and only some redemption. Buruma masterfully navigates between big events like the founding of the United Nations and individual experiences like that of his own father, who survived years of slave labor in Germany. But the themes of collaboration and revenge are front and center. In thousands of villages, and hundreds of thousands of encounters, survivors tried to exact retribution, not just for past hurts but for ideological reasons, to smooth the way to a new era.
Buruma tries to explain how difficult it was to be a true resister, when the German and Japanese reprisals were so brutal. Along a spectrum of acquiescence, almost everyone collaborated to some degree. Some became after-the-fact resisters when liberation came. On the black market the wealthy could buy a "certificate" attesting to their residence in a concentration camp.
Buruma examines the moral complexity of "moving on" and moving back to the status quo. In a massive democratic electoral shift to ward Socialism, the British threw war leader Winston Churchill out of office. At the same time, as the European colonial powers of France, Great Britain and Holland tried to re-impose control over Algeria, Indo-China, Malaya and Indonesia they found themselves struggling with emerging native, nationalist movements.
In occupied Germany and Japan, the effort to cleanse the regimes of wartime functionaries foundered on the need to quickly re-build economies and governments and prepare for what became the Cold War. Thousands of former officials found their way back into post-war government administrations. One notorious example was that Nobusuke Kishi, who spent three years in prison as a Class-A war crimes suspect, but was then released, and in 1957 became Japan's prime minister.
As evidence of the mass-extermination of Jews was discovered, the victors struggled to find legal language sufficient to charge perpetrators with crimes against humanity, or simply to execute them out of hand, in a kind of Biblical retribution. But ultimately it was agreed that the rule of law was civilization's only salvation, even if the wheels of justice did grind slowly and imperfectly.
At the Nuremberg war trials, chief prosecutor and American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson said in his opening statement that, "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put the cup to our lips as well."
