World War II

1944: the myth of the 'Good war'

Submitted by World Revolution on

This year sees the 60th anniversary of some of the final acts of the end of the Second World War. From Washington to London to the beaches of Normandy, one of the central ideological themes of the Allies' commemorations has been the continuity between the 'Good War' against fascism, and the post 9/11 'War on Terror'.

Pearl Harbor 1941, Twin Towers 2001: Machiavellianism of the US bourgeoisie

Submitted by International Review on

From the very first moments, American bourgeois propaganda has likened the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City on 11 September to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 7 December 1941. This comparison is laden with considerable psychological, historical and political impact, since it was Pearl Harbor that marked American imperialism's direct entry into the Second World War. According to the current ideological campaign presented by the American bourgeoisie, especially its mass media, the parallels are simple, direct, and self-evident:

Nazism and democracy share the guilt for the massacre of the Jews

Submitted by International Review on

It is sixty years since the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto; and by a strange irony of history, exactly one hundred years before, in 1843, Karl Marx had published his On the Jewish Question, a text which marked a significant step by Marx from radical democracy towards communism. We will come back to this text in another article; here it suffices to say that, while Marx supported the abolition of all feudal constraints on the participation of Jews in civil society, he also pointed out the inherent limitations of any merely ‘political’ emancipation which was founded on the atomised citizen, and showed that real freedom could only take place on the social level, with the creation of a unified community which had overcome commodity relations, the underlying source of man’s fragmentation into competing units.

Revolutionaries in Britain and the struggle against imperialist war, Part 4: How the Trotskyists enlisted in WW2

Submitted by World Revolution on

In the concluding part of this series by an ICC sympathiser, we examine the failure of the Trotskyist movement to uphold an internationalist position and draw some conclusions about the response of proletarian political groups to the Second World War.

Revolutionaries in Britain and the struggle against imperialist war, Part 3: the Second World War

Submitted by World Revolution on

What does it mean to defend internationalism? In the first two parts of this series, written by a close sympathiser of the ICC, we saw how revolutionaries in Britain stood up and opposed the First World War. In this part we look at how revolutionaries defended the international interests of the working class in the even more difficult conditions of the Second World War, which demanded an understanding of the balance of forces between the classes after the defeat of the revolutionary wave.

History of US foreign policy since World War II

Submitted by International Review on

The world has come a long way since the collapse of the bipolar division of the world that characterized the 45-year period of the Cold War. The era of peace, prosperity and democracy that the world bourgeoisie promised with the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 has of course never materialized. Indeed the decomposition of capitalist society, which was a consequence of the stalemate in class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie after two decades of open economic crisis and triggered the collapse of Stalinism, has relentlessly spiraled deeper and deeper into chaos, violence, death and destruction, as humanity is brought closer and closer to a future of barbarism. At the time of the writing of this article, President George W. Bush has just announced that the United States was ready to invade Iraq, with or without international support, even in the face of a failure to get a Security Council sanction for its military action. The breach between Washington and the capitals of major European countries, and even China, on the question of this imminent war is palpable. It is particularly appropriate at this conjuncture to examine the roots of American imperialist policy since the end of World War II, so as to better understand the current situation.

1944 commemorations: 50 years of Imperialist Lies, Part 2

Submitted by International Review on

In the first part of this article we tried to bring out just how ignominious were the commemorations of the 1944 landings which in no way represented a “social” liberation for the working class. On the contrary they represented an unprecedented massacre in the final years of the war; misery and terror throughout the years of reconstruction. All the members of the different capitalist camps that fought one another were responsible for the war and it resulted in a redivision of the world between the great powers.

The Communist Left of France, 1944

Submitted by International Review on

We are publishing here a leaflet by the French Fraction of the Communist Left put out in August 1944 to oppose the general mobilisation launched by the Free French on 18th August, as well as the lead article of L’Etincelle, newspaper of the same group, also from August 1944. The French Fraction of the Communist Left was formed in Marseille at the beginning of that same year.

Around the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (see our book The Italian Communist Left), reconstituted in Marseille in 1942, there formed a nucleus of about ten French elements: some of them had just broken with Trotskyism and others, still young, had only just moved towards revolutionary positions.

1944 commemorations: 50 years of Imperialist Lies, Part 1

Submitted by International Review on

Never have the D-Day landings of 6th June 1944 been commemorated with such pomp and circumstance. Never has the victory in Europe of the “Allied” imperialists given rise to such intensive media brain-washing. Its purpose is, once again, to hide the imperialist nature of the second world holocaust, like the first.

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