VE Day parades: Not our victory!

The celebrations for the 80th anniversary of “Victory in Europe” on May 8th, from London to Moscow, are always military parades, lest anyone think that World War 2 (like the one in 1914-18) was a war to end all wars…

No, we are told that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance; therefore, we must be armed to the teeth and always be ready to enlist for the national cause.

We are also told that May 1945 was the victory of democracy over fascism, freedom over tyranny and mass murder. It wasn’t yet Victory in Japan though: the democratic allies still had some of their own mass murdering to do in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was to a great extent a warning to yesterday’s ally, soon to be a new totalitarian enemy, the USSR.  Thus World War 2 was immediately succeeded by preparations for World War 3: a “Cold War” which wasn’t so cold for the millions burned and massacred by endless proxy wars between the two imperialist blocs set up in the wake of the war (this was the real nature of the bloody conflicts in China, Korea, Vietnam, Africa, Middle East over the next four decades).

The “Cold War” ended with the collapse of the “eastern bloc”, of course; but, deprived of a unifying enemy, the western alliance also began to unravel right away. Some of its formal institutions, like NATO, still survive. But the new regime in the White House aims to “tell it like it is”: as Lord Palmerston once put it, there are no permanent friends or enemies: only permanent national interests. So it’s now “America First” and Trump and Co. are busy dismantling the last vestiges of the post-war world order.

In line with the recently launched propaganda war against Europe, Trump wants to rename “Victory in Europe day” “Victory Day for World War 2”, while “Armistice Day” is to become “Victory Day for World War 1”. Trump downplays the contribution of the European powers  in defeating Nazi Germany,  insisting that “We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery or military brilliance,” It’s yet another calculated kick in the teeth for the European powers, those “freeloaders”, who  could only be saved by the  benevolence of the Americans in both world wars (Trump doesn’t mention that US assistance wasn’t exactly free: the British, for example, didn’t finish paying its war debts to the US until 2006, and, more importantly, were obliged to give up their empire to make way for  the new world hegemony of the USA).

For those who reject rituals in honour of the nation state, who still adhere to the maxim that the workers have no country, it makes no difference who claims to have made the biggest contribution to the inter-imperialist butchery of the two world wars or the Cold War. For the working class, 1945 did not mark a victory, but perhaps the lowest point in a profound historic defeat. In 1917-18 workers’ revolutions in Russia, Germany and elsewhere put a stop to the war, and for a brief interlude held out the prospect of a world without competing and warring nation states. But the revolution was defeated by the combined efforts of social democracy, fascism and Stalinism.  

By contrast World War 2 ended with both imperialist camps crushing the least threat of working class opposition to the war. Following the mass strikes in the north of Italy, where slogans against the war were voiced, in 1943 the threat was sufficient for Mussolini to be deposed by his fellow fascists, and for Churchill to pause his army’s advance from the South of Italy to “let the Italians stew in their own juice”, which meant allowing Hitler’s forces to carry out the necessary repression against the workers.

Not long afterwards, “the Red Army, which had called for the Poles to rise up against the Nazis, deliberately held its forces on the outskirts of Warsaw during the uprising of August 1944” [1] This manoeuvre led to the massacre of 15,000 insurgents and more than 200,000 Polish civilians, mostly from mass executions. In the end the whole city was razed to the ground.

The proletariat in Germany itself was decimated by the massive Allied -terror bombing strategy, including the use of incendiary bombs from which no escape was possible. The bombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin in particular was meant to snuff out any danger of proletarian revolt in that country.

Today, the divorce between the US and Europe, and the continuing slaughter in Ukraine, are accompanied by new demands from our rulers to be ready to offer life and labour in the interests of national defence. But they are also aware that they need to keep drumming this into our heads precisely because the working class today has shown itself far less willing to make sacrifices which can never be in its own interests; above all, it has shown it in the great international strike waves launched in May-June 1968 in France and Italy in 1969, culminating in Poland in 1980, and in the less spectacular but still profoundly significant class movements which began with the “Summer of Discontent” in Britain in 2022 and are coming into shape around the world today.

Our only victory will be the overturning of world capitalism!

Amos

 

 

 

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[1] Nazism and democracy share the guilt for the massacre of the Jews, International Review 113.