I think there is a quotation someplace that goes something like:  if we
fail to learn the lessons of the past, we are doomed to repeat them. In
this country the rise in historical revisionism, political correctness do
tend to want to erase the "difficulties" or "unpleasantness" of the past
and the present and rewrite what it is we should know.  I can understand
that false nationalism can colour views, but we should strive to be fair
and present/consider both/all points of view in whatever we do.
 
World War 2 involved many deaths that were not directly involved in the
military.  The philosophy of war had come to include non-military as
reasonable targets (historically, the progression of war from strictly
armies battling each other to the inclusion of "innocents" had become
complete by World War 2).  Nationalistic glorification of death is a
moral question, reaching to the very core of what is "acceptable".
 
Americans are fortunate they do not have the monuments of destruction on
their own soil, that they pass day-to-day.  It becomes easy to relegate
those images only to the media.  In Russia, the evidence of the
destruction of war is nearly everywhere; it is difficult to ignore.  We
must remember that wars are decided by political institutions that send
others to do their work for them, propogandize about the "rightness" of
the action, and edit the results for "justification" of those actions.
 
History is the storie(s) of what has happened before.  Generally, there
is more than one story about any particular event.  To understand what
happened, or may have happened, we need to consider all those stories.
 
History may be painful, or pleasant, or controversial, but it is as it is.
 
Dave Wells