SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: They teach their children that America won World War II.

They teach their children that America won World War II.

Which is, and this is important, not technically false but is also a form of organized forgetting.

The Soviet Union lost 27 million people defeating Nazi Germany.

Twenty-seven million.

The Eastern Front was the war.

What happened in Western Europe after D-Day was, from a military scale perspective, the closing chapter.

Americans know Pearl Harbor. They know D-Day. They know Hiroshima.

They do not, in general, feel in their bones the weight of 27 million Soviet dead as a fact that shaped the outcome of a war they believe they won.

This isn't ignorance. It's curation.

History gets curated to produce a specific psychological output: we are the people who save the world. We showed up, we sacrificed, we won, we rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan, we were generous in victory.

This narrative, repeated for eighty years, produces citizens who experience American power as inherently benevolent by historical nature.

And those citizens then cannot understand why anyone resists it.