The Morning Star reports:
US, French and British troops have marched across Moscow's Red Square for the first time in a Victory Day parade to commemorate the defeat of nazi Germany. The day was marked both by an impressive display of Russia's military might and an emphasis on international co-operation.
More than 26 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died to secure that victory, including more than 8.5m Red Army soldiers.
26 million. It’s a figure that blows your mind away. Yet the Soviet victims of WW2 get very little mention nowadays in the west.
There’s an insidious neo-con inspired campaign to equate the crimes committed under communism with the crimes of Nazism (Seumas Milne has written about it here and here) and to airbrush from history the enormous human sacrificies made by the Russians- and also the Serbs (another people that neocons hate with a vengeance) in the Second World War.
But as Seumas says: “The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives - in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine”
Sixty five years on from the defeat of fascism in Europe, let’s remember the role that the USSR, the UK, the USA, the Serbs and their allies in the various European Resistance movements played in that gallant endeavour.
6 comments:
Mr. Clark,
Great post. In the U.S. there is a whole industry on the Right devoted to showing that fascism and communism are really the same thing with minor differences, and that any critique of capitalism is essentially either fascist or communist or both. I don't support either ideology (fascism or communism), but I think the whole endeavor is fundamentally dishonest
Hi Mr Piccolo, many thanks.
You're right, there's a whole industry at work. Neo-conservatism is not really an ideology, it's a smokescreen for the imposition of neoliberal economic order over the whole globe and for the global elite to grab the world's assets. If countries don't open up their markets fully to international capital, they get bombed, as Yugoslavia was in 1999. Communism and socialism, because they stress public ownership, and not privatisation, pose a threat to the globalist neocon agenda. Put simply, they're not good for profits, so let's equate them with fascism.
Unsuprisingly, the first thing that the neocon Tony Blair did when taking over the Labour party leadership was to ditch Clause 4, which had committed the Party to common ownership. Then came all the wars.
The history of the Second World War is very murky going on mythical.Stalin accused Churchill to his face of having done a deal with the Nazis brokered by Hess, to sit out the war in Europe,(after the last paralysing raid of the Blitz showed what would happen otherwise) while the Germans got on with slaughtering the Communists.
Although the account of Stalin's accusation is in Laurence Rees's Behind Closed Doors, I was told the same thing as an established fact by two old-style Jewish Commies in a pub in the 70's.
Thank you for setting the record straight. My grandfather, the nicest and kindest man who ever lived, was 16 when he fought the Nazis, but if you believed the Anglo-American neocons like Marko Hoare, he was every bit as evil as the Nazis.
" The history of the Second World War is very murky going on mythical"
I agree with that; even the 'left' tend to still uncritically view WWII through the lens of UK/US propaganda. That Seamus Milne article is excellent but is constrained within very clear ideological guidelines ( as Noamsky might put it); there's no way you could publish anything in the mainstream media which might question whether Germany was entirely in the wrong (unless of course you want to blame communism) e.g. that the Sudetenland and East Prussia (the Polish corridor) belong with Germany as much as Kent and Northumbria belong with England; that German national interest was as as valid as the British . Of course the injustices of Versailles are paid lip service, but few realise just how severe these were, or know of the British blockade that starved a MILLION Germans to death AFTER WWI. It's a shame that it's left to the right-wingers to discuss these matters e.g. Patrick Buchanan's new book ' Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World'. Let me dissociate myself from Buchanan's racism and general right-wing perspective, but he is at least pushing the envelope a bit, but of course he operates within his own ideological constraints: identifiying 'communism' (or jewish bolshevism) as the real enemy the West should have been fighting. The 'real enemy' was of course, as Neil Clark has noted, independent nationalism of ANY kind, both 'national socialism' and 'socialism in one country' - the financial interests which dominated the British Empire, and which now run the US empire, hoped that both Russian and German nationalism would destroy each other, as they have sought since to open the entire world to their predations. The current war on 'notions of social justice' says it all; I hear that one US politician has called for citizens to watch out for this in their local churchs - insidious communism. Those evil nazis and commies wouldn't tolerate any freedom of thought, eh!
This event was given very little attention in the American press and television networks. I don't know why. Usually when a news item is not given coverage, it's because it contradicts a narrative. If that's the case, I don't know what narrative is being contradicted.
There were some American bloggers who covered it, and they experienced some ambivalence about American troops marching in Red Square.
There were some Russians who were unhappy about this event too, such as Alexander Prokhanov, editor in chief of the nationalist Zavtra daily.
“The fact that American troops are trampling underfoot the cobblestones of Red Square is a huge shame and humiliation for Russia,” Prokhanov said. “Thus they are celebrating their final victory not in World War II but in the Cold War.”
I'm happy for your happiness about this event. I'm just saying that whoever was putting this event together didn't get the large, positive media coverage for which they most likely hoped.
Post a Comment