Opinion: Why should we remember the wars of the world?

World
Europe

Invaders approach the outskirts of a city. The inhabitants are slow to grasp their vulnerability. But the invaders possess lethal weapons: armored vehicles, flame throwers, poison gas, aircraft. The city's defenses are overrun. As the invaders near the city, panic reigns. People flee their homes in confusion; swarms of refugees clog the roads and railways. The task of massacring them is made easy. People are slaughtered like beasts. Finally, all that remains are smoldering ruins and piles of desiccated corpses. These were the scenes H.G. Wells imagined in his science fiction The War of the Worlds published in 1898 (quoted from Niall Ferguson's The War of the World).

In the hundred years after publication, scenes like the ones Wells imagined became reality in cities all over the world. The Second World War affected nations on every continent, causing the deaths of more than 60 million people (at least two-thirds of whom were civilians). In the context of the novel, those responsible for the mass murders were aliens from Mars; in the reality of twentieth-century world politics, the victimizers and victims were both human beings. What went wrong? Will it happen again?

Peace in the abstract, the peace that is mere absence of war, does not exist in international relations. Peace is never found apart from certain conditions: it means peaceable acceptance of given conditions by negotiation and agreement.

A National Park Service volunteer escorts Retired Air Force Staff Sgt. Bill Hare, 91, as he places a wreath during a ceremony held by the Friends of the National World War II Memorial and the National Park Service, to commemorate Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day on December 7 in Washington, DC. World War II veterans and Pearl Harbor survivors placed wreaths at the Freedom Wall to commemorate the more than 400,000 Americans who lost their lives during World War II, including the more than 2,400 who lost their lives on December 7, 1941. /VCG Photo

If we trace back to history, the conditions for ceasefire and peace in the 1930s were basically those laid down by the Paris peace conference of 1919 – the states recognized, the frontiers drawn, the terms agreed to, at the close of the First World War. In the 1930s, neither Germany, Italy, Japan, nor the USSR was content with these conditions; they were dissatisfied powers and the first three were willing to undertake war itself to make a change. Great Britain, France and the US were satisfied powers, expecting no benefit from change in the conditions.

But, on the other hand, they had lost faith in the conditions and were unwilling to risk war for the sake of upholding them. They had a treaty written in 1919 which, a dozen years later, they were unwillingly to enforce.

The satisfied powers stood idly by, as long as they could, while the dissatisfied tore to pieces the states recognized, the frontiers drawn and the terms agreed to at the Peace of Paris. From the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the outbreak of European War in 1939, force was used by those who wished to upset international order, but never by those who wished to maintain it. A new world war was therefore launched by nations that had never accepted the outcome of the previous one.

People participate in a ceremony on December 13 at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall on the second annual national day of remembrance to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the massacre by Japanese troops in Nanjing. /VCG Photo

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most Europeans believed they were heading for a kind of high plateau, full of a benign progress and more abundant civilization, in which the benefits of modern science and invention would be more widely diffused and even with competitive struggle, would work out somehow for the best.

Instead, Europe stumbled in 1914 into disaster. Three things that the Europeans were so proud of in the beginning of the 20th century, namely science, the organization of industrial society and nationalism (national sovereignty), now proved to be correlated with the incidence of world violence throughout the century and after.

As time went by, however, the narrative of world wars, particularly by people like politicians and some political and social elites, began to move away from the facts and the real problems revealed by the human disasters. To varying degrees, they began to depict their country as victims rather than aggressors on the one hand, and preferred to hold on to the best part of the history – their nations' soldiers' winning, their honors and their sacrifices for their own people and the world – on the other. In this respect, Japan is a typical case.

As a result of state policy, history textbooks in Japan to this day have a major problem in reflecting objectively 20th century history, largely ignoring or overlooking the modern history of Japan’s relations with China, Korea and other neighboring countries in Asia. According to UNESCO surveys on textbooks and teaching materials within the primary and secondary schools curriculum, such unbalanced treatment of world or regional histories in the Japanese textbooks was due to the perception of those in charge that “Japan after the Modern Times is built up under the influences of West European culture and civilization.”

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. /VCG Photo

In a speech marking the 70th anniversary of the war's end, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stated quite straightforwardly that "we must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologize." It is enough, he added, "to inherit the past, in all humbleness, and pass it on to the future." To some extent, without comprehensive modern Asian historical teachings being recognized in Japan's education system, Mr Abe's frustration at being continuously blamed for war responsibility is understandable.

Most Japanese people are unaware of the plight of the comfort women and do not know what the Rape of Nanking is really about. They often fail to get the point about why neighboring countries harbor a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine – which honors war criminals among other Japanese soldiers – cause so much anger among Chinese and Koreans.

To attribute responsibility for wars to a few mad or bad men in the past and then whitewash ourselves in a "new" era is easy and comfortable, but is ignorance of the darker sides of the past a solution to build peace?

Without a serious and thoughtful survey of human evil on the basis of knowing what humankind has inflicted on itself over the past hundred years, no one knows what we might manage to do in years to come, for no one knows what is truly inevitable.

(The author is an associate professor with the China Foreign Affairs University and research fellow at the Collaborative Innovation Center for Territorial Sovereignty and Maritime Rights. The article reflects the author’s opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.)