"The modern culture doesn't understand WWII," lamented Murray. But inconvenient facts should not get in the way of a convenient narrative. This bizarre view fails to consider the inconvenient fact that the Allies included among its number the communist Soviet Union, the state that bore the brunt of the conflict in lives and domestic destruction. Presumably by this he meant the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Thus, last week, Paul Murray complained that young people tempted by left-wing politics fail to understand that the Second World War was waged against socialism. It is now going mainstream in Australia courtesy of Sky News, which recently hosted a self-identified Nazi, instigating a predictable controversy.īut now it is Sky's own journalists who are rewriting history - this time, by insinuation rather than outright scandal. This revisionism has been gaining ground for years in the right-wing parallel universe in the United States. Whether out of ignorance or on political grounds, the shape of the political spectrum - from left to right - is being challenged by revisionists backed by vested interests that seek to undermine the welfare state. At a time when conservative governments, the Murdoch press and their corporately funded think-tank supporters run down university departments of history in this country, the need for careful interpretations of the past has never been more evident.Īt stake is nothing less than the meaning of twentieth-century history and the historical origins of modern ideologies.
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