09.06.2004

Imperialist commemoration

Ian Donovan looks at the reality behind the myths being spun in the D-Day commemorations.

The commemoration of the 60th anniversary of D-Day - the US, British and ‘free French’ re-invasion of France on June 6 1944 - is a celebration of what, very unlike Bush’s Iraq war today, was a genuinely popular war among the masses of Europe.

            But for all that, and the myths of ‘anti-fascism’ and the fight for ‘liberation’ that surround D-Day in particular and World War II in general, what this war has in common with less popular wars waged before and since is that in reality (as opposed to in bourgeois and reformist mythology) it was waged for imperialist exploitation and piracy. That is notwithstanding the very real, massive democratic questions that were posed, particularly in Europe under Nazi occupation.

            The Anglo-American armed forces were not fighting to ‘liberate’ the victims of Nazism, but rather to secure their own imperialist interests and ‘right’ to plunder the world and oppress its peoples. The liberatory by-products of Hitler’s defeat that came about in Europe were more to do with the collapse and discrediting of Hitler’s specific barbaric ‘solution’ to the problems of capitalism in Germany; they did not result from the supposedly progressive nature of US and British capitalism. The reinstatement of formal democracy that occurred in France and other European countries went hand in hand with the restoration of Britain’s and France’s far-flung colonial empires to the ‘mother’ countries, colonial possessions where in many cases barbaric acts of oppression quite comparable to those of Nazi Germany took place unseen by most in the advanced ‘democracies’.

            Then, of course, there was the rise to world prominence of the United States, which quickly took under its wing many of the most useful elements of Hitler’s Nazi elite. Killers and torturers were, for example, shipped off to Latin America, where they in many cases trained the kind of people who would later run murderous death squads all over that continent for the benefit of the US, which was conducting its own version of Hitler’s crusade against Bolshevism and communism.

            Similarly Nazi missile experts were brought to America, and the weapons research originally intended to help Germany achieve world dominance went instead to the cause of US world dominance.

            For probably the majority of people on the planet, in the colonial and undeveloped world, the outcome of World War II made little difference to their lives. In the advanced capitalist countries of France, Italy, Spain, etc, the ruling classes, fearing working class struggles in their own countries, had increasingly turned to fascism as a means to crush their own working class and above all as a bulwark against communism and socialism. Pro-Nazi and pro-fascist tendencies also exerted real influence in the ruling classes of Britain and America; even Churchill, the hero of British nationalism’s ‘anti-fascist’ mythology, made pre-war speeches praising Mussolini for having provided an “antidote” to the “bestial passions of Bolshevism”. The subsequent war between them was not about antipathy to fascism, but rather about which gang of bandits got to rob and plunder the bulk of the world’s oppressed.

            Thus for communists and socialists, while recognising that there were real democratic questions posed for the masses in Europe in World War II, in the interests of the world working class, there could be no lesser-evilism between the Anglo-US-‘free French’ allies and the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo axis powers. Support for one’s own ruling class by the Labour and ‘official communist’ movements of that time was the same kind of class treachery that the socialist parties of the Second International had originally succumbed to in 1914, when they voted for the war credits of their own ruling classes on both sides of World War I.

            The main difference between the two world wars was the existence of the Soviet Union in the second. As a society where capitalism had been overthrown by the working class in 1917, it had since undergone a profound degeneration. Not a trace remained of any of the organs of working class power - workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ councils (soviets) - that had been the driving force of the 1917 revolution, and had so terrified the capitalist ruling classes of the entire world. The isolation of the revolution sealed its fate, and created an anomalous form of society in which capitalism had been uprooted, a state-organised economy had been created, but society was dominated from top to bottom by an historically unviable social elite, whose existence was based on a brutal, but ultimately unstable form of politically organised exploitation of the working class and peasantry.

            The Soviet bureaucracy justified its existence by reference to ‘socialism’, but in fact it had reduced Russia from a beacon of hope for the workers into a society so horrendously dysfunctional and pathologically oppressive that large sections of the population, particularly in the oppressed nations on the fringes of the USSR, initially saw Hitler’s armies as potential liberators.

            In reality, Russia was regarded by the Nazis as a provider of raw material. German imperialism thirsted at the prospect of reducing the former Russian empire to the status of a giant slave colony. And, indeed, it nearly succeeded. Probably only the hubris of the Nazi leader, in embarking on his eastern campaign before he had completed the defeat of his imperialist rivals in Europe, particularly Britain, and thus depriving the United States of a foothold in Europe, prevented him from eventually conquering Russia and establishing a massive German empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals and beyond.

            It was of course the Soviet peoples and armies that played probably the major role in defeating Hitler’s forces on the eastern front, with many millions of casualties. The USSR had undergone its major industrialisation, accompanied by the expropriation of the landholding peasantry and a terror-fuelled exploitation of the working class, from 1929 onwards. This had created a fairly crude and technologically backward, but in some ways quite powerful infrastructure, which was to serve the USSR well after Hitler’s invasion of 1941.

            The sheer barbarism of Hitler’s invading forces, which basically treated the indigenous population of the USSR as lower forms of life and fodder for slavery, and in particular simply sought to exterminate the Jewish population wholesale, produced a ferocious will to struggle on behalf of the Soviet peoples. It was this, together with the economy that Stalinism had created, and a certain degree of help from the Allied imperialists, which enabled the USSR to inflict major defensive blows against the Nazi invaders, and thus gave the US and Britain the chance to carry out the D-day invasion.

            One does not have to labour under the illusions of Stalinism that the USSR represented some form of ‘socialism’, nor under the Trotskyist variant of this illusion that Stalin’s regime represented some form of working class rule (albeit in a severely degenerated form), to recognise that in some ways, albeit with many complexities around the fringes, the war on the eastern front represented a titanic struggle of a people threatened with slavery and colonisation on the model of India or Africa, against that fate. In contrast to the populations of the USSR and indeed Poland and other east European nations, the population of the western, imperialist countries occupied by Hitler were treated with relative kid gloves.

            With the principal exception of the Jewish people of course, who for reasons that were actually irrational from the standpoint of German imperialism itself, were defined as racial enemies to be simply wiped out.

            The other advanced European states were regarded, as befitting the imperialist nature and ideology of the Nazis, as fellow imperialist nations and allies against the colonised and enslaved, even if they were going to have to play second fiddle to German imperialism in the Nazi ‘new order’.

            Thus in fact Hitler’s plans for France, and indeed Britain, were not that different in essence to what was subsequently done to Germany under American tutelage after Hitler’s defeat: a purge, reorientation and reorganisation, and incorporation as a junior member of the dominant partner’s new international network of alliances.

            It does not take a great deal of historical acumen to see the difference between these two, distinct elements of World War II: the liberatory war being waged by the Soviet peoples in particular against slavery, colonisation and plunder; and the war of the British and French imperialists for the preservation and restoration of their colonial empires and, on the part of the United States, for a new post-war imperialist ‘American century’. For the international working class, the latter imperialist component was absolutely not supportable in any way. Indeed, the victory of the imperialist element of the World War II alliance led straight to the confrontation of the cold war, with the western powers themselves seeking to initiate the same kind of confrontation with the USSR and the colonial peoples, this time with nuclear weapons.

            For all the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles that have erupted since, and indeed in world politics in general, one thing is clear. The outcome of World War II was merely the replacement of Nazi German by ‘democratic’ US imperialism as an even more powerful international force for the preservation of capitalism - and using methods that threatened, and still threaten, the survival of humanity itself.

            That victory was no victory for the working class, and this understanding should govern our attitude to the D-day celebrations organised by the ruling classes. They are celebrating their own victories, not ours.