Reassessing the Second World War

ABSTRACT World War II has been remembered in the United States as “the good war.” Scholarship on the war and its cause generally concentrates on the events of the 1930s with Adolf Hitler as the chief villain. The works reviewed here argue that this focus is too narrow. Understanding the war’s causes requires one to go back to the ideological struggles unleashed by the Russian Revolution in 1917. Additionally, Hitler was at most peripheral to the Second World War in Asia. Instead, it appears that a focus on the role of Josef Stalin is more appropriate in understanding the war. Additionally, the conflict’s human costs and the fact that it turned so much of humanity over to the dictatorship of Stalin leads to a reassessment of whether it really was the “good war.”