27.04.1995

Waving the imperialist flag

UNLESS you lock yourself in an air-raid shelter for the duration of VE-Day celebrations, you will not be able to avoid the barrage of national chauvinist propaganda.

Newsround will feature reports from Auschwitz and Berlin, which will parrot the ‘official’ pro-British line. The Department of Education has sent information packs to schools, which will also agree that a British victory over foreign foes is a sacred thing which must be celebrated.

For the adults a myriad of programmes will provide a steady, diet of patriotic drivel.

The British ruling class is attempting to rerun World War II solely in order to revive nationalism and to divert attention from its own internal divisions and splits. History will therefore be tinkered with, if not re-written from top to bottom. The struggle between the ‘democratic’ imperialism of the allied powers and the ‘totalitarian’ imperialism of the axis powers will be mythologised as the triumph of democracy over fascism.

We need to emphasise, once again, that the second imperialist world war was in essence the continuation of the first. Specifically we must point to the fact that VE-Day was a masquerade from start to finish even within the bourgeois remit of what the war supposedly aimed to achieve.

The so-called ‘de-Nazification’ of Germany was sham, as scores of ex-Nazis returned to positions of power in post-war German politics and industry, while Werner Von Braun and other top missile scientists were quickly spirited away to help the west in the new Cold War against the Soviet Union.

The Communist Party will stand resolutely against the tide of national chauvinism and imperialist flag-waving which is about to be unleashed. We will take every opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of our ‘anti-fascist’ ruling class, which pitted British workers against workers abroad in a bitter fight to the death in the name of its profits.

Eddie Ford