Despite the sheer craziness of the political and cultural landscape in recent months, one particularly nutty 2024 bingo-card item none of us expected began with the bizarre argument that the Nazis were somehow the victims of World War II. And now it’s morphed into the equally absurd claim that the Soviet Union was morally superior to the apparently war-crime-obsessed Western Allies.

This largely started with famed foreign policy expert Candace Owens, who tried to frame the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as an attack on Christians who were “burned alive on Ash Wednesday.” She also argued that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki targeted Christians, with “the bomb dropped 300 yards from a Catholic Church.” And who can forget her declaration that “Americans know nothing about real history” because “12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed after WW2.”

Even the laziest Google search shows that this number relates to the Germans who fled or were expelled from east-central Europe back into (West) Germany and Austria — because there are consequences for starting and losing the bloodiest act of conquest in human history.

But this level of ignorance isn’t limited solely to those who believe that the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem is tantamount to a Muslim ghetto. Speaking with Piers Morgan, professor John Mearsheimer pushed the latest act of historical revisionism: praising the Soviet Union for managing to fight without resorting to the supposed airborne barbarity of the United States and Great Britain.

“If you look at how the Soviets fought, who were basically responsible for defeating the Nazis in World War II, they did not commit many war crimes in the process of defeating the Wehrmacht,” Mearsheimer argued. “It was basically a ground war where the Soviets, the Red Army, rolled up the Wehrmacht. There were no bombing of cities. There were no dropping of nuclear weapons.”

After acknowledging that “there was no question there was a lot of rape and pillaging, especially at the end,” Mearsheimer said “aside from that,” this was not a “purposeful campaign to murder huge numbers of civilians” and the Soviet Union proved it’s possible to fight a ground war between two armies that “avoids the problem of bombing cities and murdering huge numbers of civilians.”

Um … what?

Not only did the Soviet Union engage in bombing raids on enemy targets, but any limitation was far more likely rooted in a lack of capability rather than some moral hesitation to trample on the value of human life, as claimed by Marxist propagandists at the time. And despite the comparative lack of bombing campaigns, this didn’t stop the Red Army from carrying out multiple massacres of civilians throughout the war.

And let’s not miss the afterthought of “rape and pillaging” that was hastily thrown in during Mearsheimer’s strange defense of the Soviet Union. Historians estimate that the number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops throughout the war could be as many as 2 million, let alone the Polish, Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian women and girls on the way to Berlin. Rape was so prevalent that a Soviet war correspondent described the Red Army as an “army of rapists,” raping “every German female from eight to 80.”

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Whenever these strange moral debates appear, people need to remember the ever-quoted words of Gen. William T. Sherman: “War is hell.” Our coddled and naive society has no real concept of the horrors of conflict — so much so that it has allowed the ignorant and the ideologically driven to take the worst moments of the West from the deadliest years of human history while ignoring context and reinventing reality in pursuit of their own absurd and dangerous narratives.

It’s one thing to debate whether the Allied bombing campaigns were justifiable — which, by the way, they were. It’s another to suggest that evil regimes, including the Nazis and the Soviet Union, were morally superior to the Western Allies — Western Allies who are entirely responsible for the freedom we still enjoy today.

Ian Haworth is a columnist, speaker, and host of “Off Limits.” You can follow him on X at @ighaworth. You can also find him on Substack.