Seventy years ago this week Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, ignited the most cataclysmic war in history.
Some six years later, with over 60 million dead, a Holocaust conceived as the Final Solution for European Jewry, killing fields that left most of Europe scarred and, finally, the unleashing of atomic weapons over Japan, the carnage ended.
Mighty volumes of the war’s history have been written. Memoirs, official records and grisly details of unimaginable sufferings of victims have been published. Documentaries and record numbers of movies have been produced to understand how and why civilization could break down so utterly.
In retrospect it was a human calamity brought about by the quintessential fact of man’s inherent fallibility and his dilemma when confronted with evil.
Winston Churchill would later say, ‘There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action.’
Seventy years later we still live in the shadows of the war Hitler started, and its consequences remain with us.
From the perspective of Sept. 11, 2001, and the terrorist attacks on America’s heartland, the lasting effect of the Second World War has been the near fatal weakening of will, or self-confidence, in the values of enlightenment that set the West as a civilization apart from others in the making of the modern world.
The war was immensely costly in human lives. But the cost that cannot be tallied in numbers was the loss of will, the erosion of belief over time in values of freedom, reason and democracy that are always imperilled when left inadequately protected.
Even before the war finally ended with Japan’s surrender, the result of the May 1945 election in Britain – the defeat of Churchill’s Conservative party to Clement Attlee’s Labour party – set the scene for an unseemly retreat of the western colonial powers from Asia and Africa.
The manner in which Britain handed over its imperial legacy – nearly 200-year presence in and rule over India – and the haste with which demands for independence was conceded by partitioning what was once her crown jewel, set the template for her retreat from the Middle East and Africa.
Other European colonial powers would follow on the heels of Britain sooner or later, or as France would be compelled to do so. But for the timely resolve of president Harry Truman’s America to contain the expansionist former Soviet Union, the red tide of communism might well have rolled further westward across Europe and into the Middle East.
The Cold War, or the containment of the Soviet Union for nearly half a century that took Americans into Korea and then Vietnam, would have its deleterious effects on the United States as the Second World War did on Europe.
Doubts, skepticism and, most importantly, guilt – the hallmark of the western civilization – would take its toll on the West that was once confident of its civilizational values.
Penance in politics might well take many forms and multiculturalism in the West is one form of atoning for sins of colonialism in the past.
On the 70th anniversary of the most horrendous war in history there is grief and remembrance, yet the loss of the West’s self-confidence is also palpable in its inability to name the evil raging since at least 9/11.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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