China, Russia's sacrifices must not be forgotten

The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. But in recent years, the truth about that devastating war has been ignored and twisted as the world seems to be sliding into more chaos.

The Chinese people have always known, as part of a truth key to their culture, the oldest and most continuously maintained repository of human experience in the world, that the lessons of history are central to understanding and navigating the present times, and foreseeing the trends, challenges and dangers of the future.

Therefore, remembering the true history and lessons of the defeat of the monstrous Nazi Germany, and fascist and racist Japan which sought to conquer and dominate the world remains the key to restoring mutual respect, dialogue and understanding, and laying the foundation of lasting peace in today's world.

The West could not have survived, let alone shared in the triumph over the genocidal Axis in World War II, were it not for the central roles played by Russia and China.

Musing on the reasons the US emerged with relatively low casualties at the end of World War II, the beloved and acclaimed US combat correspondent Ernie Pyle said: "We won this war because our men are brave and because of many things — because of Russia, England and China and the passage of time and the gift of nature's material."

Eighty years on, it is all too tragically clear that the leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and the other major Western nations that still dutifully follow them have forgotten those wise and humble words. They even sneer at Pyle's wisdom, and have only contempt for it.

Pyle honestly and honorably acknowledged the vastly greater sacrifices that the Chinese and Russian peoples made as the worst bloodbaths swept over the great landmass of Eurasia.

World War II did not start on Dec 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Nor did the war begin on Sept 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, or two days later when Britain and France declared war on Germany.

It should be recognized that the all-out war actually began on July 7, 1937, when the Japanese military created an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge at the suburb of Beijing as an excuse and justification for its full-scale invasion of China.

Through that dark summer the Imperial Japanese Army drove up the Yangtze River Valley killing Chinese people. This culminated in the Nanjing Massacre when an estimated 300,000 people were massacred. It was a war crime so nefarious and horrific that it appalled even senior Nazi Party members in China who witnessed it.

Yet the Chinese people never abandoned their struggle to regain their national independence, freedom and dignity. There were an estimated 35 million casualties during the war. And because they soaked up the vast majority of the land power of the Japanese army, the US armed forces in their own advance across the Pacific Ocean and up the archipelagos of the Western Pacific were able to defeat and destroy much smaller Japanese occupation forces in detail.

However, this strategic aspect of the struggle, while acknowledged by all serious US historians, is almost never referred to or acknowledged by the US mass media or government leaders.

A similar blindness to an enormous, undeniable but also inconvenient truth lies in the parallel refusal of the Western elites and of recent generations of Western people to acknowledge that it was the Soviet Union's military that killed about 80 percent of Nazi Wehrmacht troops in Europe in World War II. The Soviet Union lost at least 27 million people in the war, with some recent estimates putting the civilian death toll significantly higher.

Even war-time British prime minister Winston Churchill acknowledged while raising a toast at a Kremlin banquet in October 1944 that, "it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army".

Yet today, our modern world is still skirting the edge of global conflagration and catastrophe through the bellicosity and bluster of ignorant and irresponsible leaders across the West who remain trapped in ignorance and a maze of bigotry of their own making.

The 80th anniversary of the most awful war in human memory offers them, and the craven media elites who so uncritically swallow and regurgitate this fateful, deadly nonsense, a chance to break free from what the great 18th century English poet and mystic William Blake called "the infernal grove" of lies and damnation that threaten us all.

The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

The author is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow.