Lessons from WWII

By staff reporter LU RUCAI

There have always been contradictions between countries around the world. We, however, should not be vexed by them, but instead adopt the right attitude and appropriately respond to them,” Nakayama Toshio of the Clausewitz Society of Japan said at an international seminar held in Beijing last July to retrospect World War I and II. Mr. Toshio went on to say that the hegemony of world big powers has fallen apart since WWII. He added that in the contemporary age of nuclear power, China’s advocacy and practice of pacifism and keeping pace with the historical trend by developing its economy is a positive force for world peace.

Scholars from more than a dozen countries around the world gathered at the seminar. Among the topics they discussed were the cause and backdrop of the two world wars, recollections of them and their impact on the international order, lessons to be drawn from the wars, and world peaceful development.

Reviewing and summarizing the two world wars and learning from that piece of history is vital to fostering healthy inter-country relations, especially those between major powers, maintaining world peace, and promoting the common progress of humankind.

A veteran of Britain’s WWII Parachute Regiment watches parachutists at a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Normandy Landings in France on June 5, 2014.

Root Causes

World War II, involving 60 or more countries and two billion people, was a disastrous event for humankind. Almost 60 million lives were lost, five countries having suffered casualties exceeding five million. China was among the worst affected, with more than 35 million casualties and property losses upward of US $500 billion.

Participants in the July seminar, entitled “World War I and World War II in Retrospect, Lessons and Inspirations,” attributed the outbreak of the two wars to the longstanding unjust, irrational international order that resulted from the imperialist powers’ colonial expansion and the rivalry among them.

“Adolf Hitler’s ruthless ambitions for boundless “Lebensraum” (living space), Benito Mussolini’s pursuit of “supreme power,” and Japan’s goal of conquering first Asia and then the whole world signified unbridled expansionism,” professor of history at Capital Normal University Xu Lan said. Contention for world hegemony was most prominent in the countries that started WWII.

Nationalism also played a key role. In Ms Xu’s opinion, by the 20th century the nationalist sentiment in Western countries had lost its progressive quality of safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of a people. It had degraded to extreme nationalism, national chauvinism, colonialism, and imperialism, all in the interests of the bourgeois ruling class. The Versailles System after WWI acted as an incubator for WWII, Xu said. “The Treaty of Versailles required that Germany accepts responsibility for the loss and damage that Germany and her allies caused during the war. This had grim consequences, exacerbating friction between the defeated and the victors,” Ms. Xu said, adding, “The policy of appeasement, adopted by Western democracies headed by the U.K. in the 1930s, is another factor that detonated WWII earlier than expected.”

According to research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences Wang Jinhua, Japan’s invasion of China should also be interpreted in the historical context. Militarism swelled after the Meiji Restoration, laying the ideological foundation for its later aggression towards other Asian countries. Japan’s political and military mechanisms, centered on adulation of the emperor, moreover created the conditions for a large-scale aggressive war. The prospect of capital accumulation and appreciation through military expansion was also strong motivation for Japan to wage a massive war.