World War II Was Barely or Not Ideological at All
The WWII victory is often framed as antifascist triumph, yet the conflict was a complex clash of national interests and power struggles, with Greece’s sacrifice belonging to the nation, beyond ideology.
The anniversary of the end of World War II raises a deeper question each year: what exactly did the Allies defeat in 1945? Nazism as an ideology or the German and Axis pursuit of hegemony in Europe?
The answer given by the prevailing modern narrative is almost always one-dimensional: “anti-fascism defeated fascism.”
However, the historical reality is much more complex. The left, especially after the Metapolitefsi (the period of political transition in Greece after the fall of the military junta in 1974), attempted to ideologize World War II, presenting it almost exclusively as a moral and ideological confrontation between democracy and fascism. Yet this overlooks a critical element:
The war was primarily a conflict between states, empires, and national interests.
Germany sought European domination. The United Kingdom fought to maintain the balance of power on the continent and its own imperial position. The Soviet Union struggled both for its survival and for the expansion of its influence. The United States emerged from the war as a global superpower. Greece fought for its national existence against invasion and occupation.
If the war were purely ideological, how then is it explained that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a key ally of the Western democracies? That Ioannis Metaxas’ Greece fought alongside the Allies? That the colonial empires presented themselves as defenders of “freedom”? And that conservative and anti-communist circles in Britain desired, even quite late into the conflict, an understanding with Germany against Bolshevism?
The reality is that states operate primarily based on interest, security, and the balance of power. This does not mean ideology played no role. Nazism was indeed a criminal and inhumane ideology, characterized by racial fanaticism, totalitarianism, and unprecedented brutality. However, the subsequent transformation of the entire war into an abstract “anti-fascist crusade” primarily served political purposes.
After 1945, Western Europe needed reconciliation with postwar Germany, the creation of a new European identity, the weakening of old national rivalries, and a shared moral narrative upon which the new European order would be built.
Thus, the war was increasingly presented less as a “victory over German hegemony” and more as a “global victory of anti-fascism.”
The left adopted this narrative with particular intensity because it allowed it both to gain historical and moral prestige through the “anti-fascist” identity and to transfer contemporary political conflicts into the realm of historical memory. It also often equated any form of patriotism, conservatism, or national reference with the “antechamber of fascism.”
However, this comes at the cost of losing historical complexity.
Greece in 1940 did not go to war because it conducted some abstract ideological campaign. It went to war because it was invaded. The Greek people resisted for their homeland, their freedom, and their survival.
This is also why the national memory of the war cannot be confined to contemporary ideological frameworks. The sacrifice of the Greeks does not certainly belong to the left, nor necessarily to the right. It belongs to the Greek Nation!
