I AM getting on in age and I don’t think, with all my existence spent reading, I will ever understand people and the world. Sigmund Freud said he doesn’t think he ever understood people. We are at the time when the world celebrates the start of the beginning of the end of Hitler’s war machine.
When you look at the war back then in 1944 and 1945, you think it is mysterious and inexplicable that the USA threw two atomic bombs on Japan, yet today, Japan is perhaps the closest country to the US and has an antagonistic relation with Russia which never fought against the Japanese. Japan colonised China and brutalised it yet Japan has no friendly relations with China.

Germany is very close to the US which defeated it in the war and prosecuted and executed its leaders. Yet Germany has a long, antagonistic relation with Russia. How do you explain these mysteries?
Every year, on June 6, the Western world celebrates the landing of Allied troops on Omaha beach in Normandy, France in 1944 to attack Germany from the Western flank in Europe. It is referred to in history as D-Day
Two Academy Award war movies have recorded the landing – The Longest Day, filmed in black and white in 1962, remains the movie with the largest star cast. I read a write-up on the movie yesterday in celebration of D-Day.
The columnist enumerated the star cast, but failed to mention an actor in the film that would become a mega-star and eclipse all the big names in that film – Sean Connery – aka – 007, James Bond. The other movie is “Saving Private Ryan.”
So once more, we have D-Day celebration which is the event that marks the beginning of the defeat of Hitlerite Germany. But is it? Isn’t this the way it has been presented to us in the post-colonial world? Our colonial invaders were the Western Europeans, particularly the UK and France. Was it not logical for them to hand the post-colonial world, their historical narratives that they shaped for their own epistemological and ontological reasons?

So the British and American landing at Omaha Beach we were taught by the British in the colonies was the decisive turning point in the war. After Independence, the Americans took over from the British and the shaped European narratives were transformed from the greatness of Pax-Britannica to Pax-America and thus history was presented to the post-colonial world turned from Euro-centric to American-centric.

D-Day, as the historic turning point in the war, remains intact. Who is to write an alternative history to D-Day? It has been written but it was never presented to the former European colonies. It was written by the historians of the USSR (present day Russia) but it was composed at the wrong time.
This was in the era of the Cold-War which began in 1945. The former colonies dominated by their former empires and the USA would not have been given this alternative analysis on how Germany was defeated and which country played the crucial role. Germany was defeated by both the Allied countries and the incredible and unbelievable courage and sacrifice of the people of the USSR. There could have been no defeat of Germany if the USSR did not confront Germany from the eastern flank.
Simply put – the USSR could not obliterate Germany’s war machine without the West and the West could not have won without the equal role of the USSR. But an entire generation around the globe born after the 1960s only knows about the West’s defeat of Germany. You ask any human around the world who stopped Germany and they will tell you the British and Americans on D-Day. This is fictional history or partial history or distorted history.

The losses of the USSR during the Second World War are going to amaze you if you did not know. The USSR lost 27 million humans including eight million armed personnel and 19 million civilians.
The bulk of casualities were of the Russian ethnicity. Now read this and tell me if it will not allow you to see the history as presented to you in a different light and allow you to search for the facts and not the explanations of history. Do you know that total casualties of the USSR combined the loss of life of all the Allied countries? Should not the peoples of the world be taught the facts of history of the crucial role Russia played in ending the war machinery of Hitler? I guess who controls the world writes the narratives.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.