Eighty years ago this May 8 (May 9 in the Soviet Union), the degenerate thug army that waged World War II for the Nazi German government was forced to surrender unconditionally to the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain. The war in Europe was over. The war in Asia would be over within a year. The fascist attempt to dominate the world was crushed.
As usual, when anniversaries important to the working class occur, we will be subjected to a barrage of lies aimed at standing history on its head.
Why? Because the truth is dangerous.
Because it was communists who were responsible for the victory over fascism.
Because this victory was the greatest achievement of the international communist movement after the Russian Revolution. It won the overwhelming majority of the world’s working people to the communist cause.
That is the true history.
The ruling class is eager for us to dishonor our heroic and martyred comrades, and to forgive their torturers and murderers, because the ruling class has inherited the murderers’ legacy.
What we must remember
But what should we remember? We must never forget our hatred of the capitalist class that produced fascism, that coddled fascism, that embraced fascism, and that profited from fascism. So we must remember how fascism arose, what it stood for, how it won a mass base, and the horrors it inflicted.
But this is only one part, and not the main part.
The fascist aggressors were an alliance of scum. They were led by Nazi Germany and included the ruling bosses of Italy, Japan, Hungary, Finland, “Vichy” France, and Romania, along with Spain and Portugal. They started the war in 1939 to seize control of world capitalism and enslave all whom they could conquer.
What happens to a Russian, to a Czech does not interest me in the slightest. What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only insofar as we need them as slaves for our Kultur; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.” – Heinrich Himmler, speech at Posen October 4, 1943.
Fascism dictated the aggressive war these monsters fought and the terrible peace they brought. “Eradicate all who oppose us,” ordered Adolph Hitler, their leader. Theirs was a war of atrocity and unimaginable terror, their peace a living hell for the conquered.
The imperialists whom the Nazis sought to replace were split. One faction was pro-fascist. Another wanted to make a live-and-let-live deal with the fascists. A third, too wedded to their empires to concede anything, eventually decided to fight the Germans. ·
For a time, the appeasers carried the day. But the fascists ruined things for them. They would not be appeased. No deals were possible. In the end, when all else had failed, Britain and the U.S. were forced to fight Hitler to preserve their empires and global markets. But they couldn’t stand against the fascists without Soviet help.
Only communists could beat the Nazis
Every time the British took on the main force of German troops, the Germans whipped them. Only after the Soviets had wiped out these troops could the British cope with what was left of the Nazi Army. In Asia, the British lost every campaign they fought.
Nor was the U.S. military record any better. In their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese sank the entire U.S. combat fleet. Then the Japanese Army kicked the U.S. Army from every one of its bases.
Neither the U.S. nor the British played a significant role in the European war until the very end, the mop-up. Nor was the famous U.S. island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific of any great significance in winning the Asian war against Japan. That war was strategically settled by the Chinese resistance organized by the Chinese Communist Party, and by the Soviet move against Japan after V-E Day. The U.S. bosses dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki not to defeat Japan–it was already defeated–but to warn the Soviets not to try to share the occupation of Japan.
Immediately after V-E Day, Winston Churchill planned “Operation Unthinkable” to rearm the Nazi army and attack the Soviet Union. The plan was abandoned because the working class in Europe would never have accepted it. Stalin and the USSR were their heroes.
Anti-fascism isn’t enough
This brings us to the second, and most important, of the things we must remember. What did our comrades—and the masses of those terrorized, enslaved and butchered people who rose up and crushed the “master race”—fight for? Where did their courage come from? Where can ours come from today?
Hitler’s fascism was so systematically evil that anti-fascism seemed an absolute good unto itself. But this wasn’t so. Not then, not now. Anti-fascism by itself led not to the future, but to the past, the past that allowed the Nazis to rise.
For proof, look to the postwar history of Greece. The country’s partisan army was defeated in a civil war by a British-U.S. intervention allied with Greek reactionaries. As a result, the Greek working class endured years of agony, culminating in a fascist military dictatorship.
The German Nazis were not the only brand of fascism. In fact, Hitler’s fascism was so atrocious it gave fascism a bad name. There was fascism before the Nazis, there was fascism after Hitler’s coalition was defeated, there is fascism today. U.S. foreign policy is based on sponsoring fascism throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
History shows that you can’t defeat fascism with anti-fascism. Nor can you prevent it from rising again with anti-fascism, because fascism is built into capitalism. Fascism can also develop from socialism, because socialism contains many of the capitalist tools of exploitation, including money, wages, and wage differentials. That is why our party fights for communism and the immediate abolition of wages and money.
The most tragic confirmation of the weakness of anti-fascism is the experience of the communist movement itself.
Before the war, the Soviet communist leaders invented one diplomatic scheme after the next to ally with non-fascist capitalist states to “contain” fascism. But these capitalist ruling classes feared communist revolution more than fascism, and they refused the Soviet overtures. Anxious to please the non-fascist capitalist rulers, even as these rulers were appeasing the fascists, the Soviet leaders pressured the international communist movement to abandon organizing for revolution in favor of organizing against fascism. But it was no use. Still no deals.
Finally, faced with Germany on the march, and with no allies (and of course no revolutions) to weaken the enemy camp, the Soviet leaders felt compelled to make their own deal with the Nazis, and signed a nonaggression pact. This confused and demoralized many communist militants worldwide. It produced no lasting security for the Soviets, since the Nazis invaded the moment they felt ready.
The soviets won by defending the revolution
As it turned out, it was the class enemy who forced the communists back to the revolution. The Nazis invaded with the slogan, “An End to Bolshevism.” Then they inflicted such a reign of terror and murder as to force any survivor to identify life itself with Bolshevism.
How were the Soviets able to resist? Only by mobilizing the Party members and the masses of workers to defend the revolution. When the Red Army troops charged into battle, it was with Stalin’s name on their lips as a war cry. To the masses, Stalin symbolized the communist revolution, the struggle for equality.
“I would like to drink to the health of people who have little status or title. To people who are considered "cogs" in the great state mechanism, but without whom all of us -- marshals and commanders of fronts and armies, to put it bluntly -- are worthless.” – Joseph Stalin’s toast to the masses, July 25, 1945.
The Soviet people taught the world how to resist oppression by simply defending their revolution. And lo and behold, four months of this revolutionary war forced Britain and the U.S. to ally with the Soviets—something eight years of diplomacy had failed to achieve.
Only communism can arm the working class
In occupied Europe, it was the same. The communists organized the partisan armies with the promise of revolution after victory. There was no other way to mobilize the people. The risks and fear were too great without the communist ideal.
Though the partisans’ professed slogan was “anti-fascist patriotism,” they, too, went into battle shouting Stalin’s name. But what was the reality? The reality was the international unity of workers in the worldwide communist movement.
Revolution mobilized our comrades. Revolution was what the masses willingly sacrificed and died for. Revolution gave them courage. That is what we must remember. That is the true history.
After their great victory, the communists forgot how they’d won. They remembered “anti-fascist patriotism.” That was the triumph of false consciousness.
After victory, the communists organized anti-fascist coalitions with whatever capitalist forces would join them and took power wherever they could. They knew it wasn’t revolution. They called it “liberation.” They were liberated from the Nazis. But they were not liberated from capitalism. There were no revolutions in Europe after World War II.
In the Soviet Union, the pre-war pattern of capitalist production relations went undisturbed. Since the communists in power never organized a communist revolution, never transformed production relations, the working class had no way to exercise power.
Inevitably, a new form of fascism emerged. When a socialist state turns away from the struggle for workers’ power and egalitarianism, it must eventually decay into a fascist state. Both the USSR and China have done just that.
These are the real lessons of the true history of World War II. If we are to be loyal to the legacy of our comrades, to the courageous workers who fought for us, we must never forget to fight for communist revolution.
