History was always written by the victors, we only see it happen in real time now.
A modern spin on this: history is no longer written by the victors, but by people with literally no life outside of writing crap on the internet
Still acting on the basis of the propaganda they drank like kool-aid, but pretty much. Hard to exclude some biased editors aren't actually paid from organizations/parties tho.
There’s perhaps a narrow sense in which this is true of how it is written, but that's really not the sense the original gets at, anyhow.
Which elements of the writing of those “people with literally no life” gets distributed, amplified, and becomes crystallized as history is still actively shaped by the victors, not only of the clashes between societies, but of the class and subculture conflicts within them.
And that editorial and distribution control, not the actual mechanical act of writing, is what the original was about.
The sense of alienation is overwhelming here. We're not reading stories about something that once happened to someone, we're being sold stories about what is happening to us, and what we are doing, right now.
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edit: Walter Lippmann did this stuff for a living, and wrote a lot about it and the political implications of imbalances of information. I don't think it's such a huge difference that people 100 years ago only got two newspapers a day worth of information (early and late editions), and we now get our information rations in smaller portions.
In the beginning, it was mostly attributed to Russia (something like 80%) with the USA mostly protecting Europe from getting integrated into Russia after the fall. But over time this opinion has been overturned to being mostly the USA with Russia playing a minor role... And the fact that Russia could've likely just taken over Europe completely has been forgotten entirely.
Well, seeing how Russia can't even take over Russia today, people have doubts! That's a joke, don't get all serious ;-)
The huge role of Soviet Union was pushed by the Soviet Union as part of its Great Patriotic War narrative is continued to this day by Russia's propaganda. Without the US Lend-Lease, the situation could have turned out much differently for the soviets (as even Stalin himself admitted).
I just wanted to make a pretty strong example of the winners rewriting history and how this propaganda becomes fact for the society.
I'm sure everyone here agrees that it's good that the fascists lost the war and that the USA enabled Europe to stay democratic. It was a very brutal period of time in which human life was sadly undervalued.
Karl Marx ideas were very revolutionary for its time (a good primer can be found in the book The Value of Everything) and set a lot of ideas in motion. And there was also debate in that regard on how to institute communism. So communism could never reach the “evil” moniker like Nazism, even though it was apparent the Soviet Union was quite a brute. So the ideology was kind of separated cognitively from its implementation by the Soviet Union.
In the Cold War period, the SU was definitely seen as something that had to be defeated. There was a lot of fear of nuclear escalation between the superpowers. The Soviet Union was seen as different at best, and something to be defeated in all cases. And yes, also evil. Just watch some action movies from that time to get a general idea.
Which is why I didn't attribute truth to either of these claims, instead I pointed out that the USSR would've likely taken over Europe without the direct involvement of the USA, i don't think that this is controversial at all, or do you believe they would've stopped in the middle of today's Germany if they weren't forced to?
Beyond that, Nazis are hardly vilified, because they're literally villainous. Please remember that Nazism isn't National Socialism, what the Nazi regime was based on. It was one specific version of it, which includes mass murdering vast amounts of people. You can make an argument that national socialism isn't necessarily bad, but doing the same for the Nazis means you also condone mass murder, as a simple example: exterminating queer people and people with disabilities was core to their doctrine.
I'm utterly at a loss how I'm supposedly ignoring the crimes of the USSR. Would I have been glad that the USA protected Europe from it if I considered them faultless?