— Henri Denis —
(cpcml.ca, February 2, 2022)
To appreciate the significance of the victory at Stalingrad which turned the tide of World War II, it is instructive to recall that when the Nazis unleashed their venom and destruction against the peoples of Europe and invaded the Soviet Union to crush communism, it was one of the darkest periods in the living memory of humankind. The Nazis’ fierce opposition to the birth of the New, heralded by the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917, was enjoined by the remnants of czarism and their cousins in the capitals of Europe who were moving might and main to hold onto their ill-gotten aristocratic titles, wealth, possessions and class privileges.
To achieve its striving to take over all of Europe and the Soviet Union, Hitlerite Nazism promoted everything profoundly obscurantist and unscientific. Based on anti-worker, racist and anti-communist ideology, no crime was too great to achieve the glory of the Third Reich which threatened to return a large part of humankind to slavery and barbarism. Such is the only quality the Old could produce to prevent the birth of the New.
On the other hand, resistance to this assault of the Old gave rise to the most advanced organizational principles, ideology and modern methods of work to achieve the full mobilization of the workers and peoples behind the historic task of those days to defeat Nazi-fascism and defend each people’s right to be. This is what the communist party led by Joseph Stalin achieved. Their deeds embodied the spirit that imbued the people of Stalingrad to give their all to defeat the barbarians who invaded the Soviet Union and to liberate all of Europe.
The Anglo-American imperialists became allies of the Soviet Union because the beast they appeased when they signed the Munich Pact with Hitler was not under their control and threatened their very existence. They also could only resort to everything that is underhanded and regressive to achieve their aims. They spared no opportunity to ensure their rule would not fall to the communist forces who led the anti-fascist resistance in the countries of Europe. They did everything possible to make sure the leadership of the communists was undermined so as to vie for control of the outcome. This was especially the case once the victory over fascism was a sure thing when, amongst many other examples, they manoeuvred to have the Hitlerite forces surrender to them, not the Soviets. They also collaborated with the Vatican, which ran operations to permit the Nazis to escape justice, and established the Office of Strategic Services, precursor organization to the CIA, and then the CIA itself to run covert counter-revolutionary operations. After the war, they set up anti-communist apparatuses in the universities and within media and cultural organizations, the unions and social organizations in Europe and in North America to undermine and liquidate support for the most prominent writers, artists and scientists of those days as well as workers, for the great advances and progress achieved in the Soviet Union.
The Anglo-American imperialists organized to overthrow governments by coups d’état, gave rise to McCarthyism and the brutal assault on the right to conscience and freedom of expression. All of this was done to defeat the political movements of the people which sought to open the road to freedom, peace and progress and establish governments that would be ruled by them, not ruled in favour of imperialism and reaction. All of it pitted the discredited elitist system of liberal democracy — said to uphold a stereotype of liberty — against the stereotype called communist tyranny. This anti-communist construct is what motivates the ruling circles today, both those who call themselves right-wing and those who call themselves left-wing or progressive or humanitarian, or mixtures of these. This anti-communist spectre puts communism and fascism on par. While monuments are erected to remember the victims of what are called the crimes of the communists, a wall of silence is imposed around the crimes of the Nazis. The exception is the European holocaust used by many to promote the political ideology of Zionism, not to make reparations to all the victims of the Nazis in Europe which includes the Jews, the communists and social democrats, the Roma and the category they called “delinquents,” as well as the peoples of the conquered territories they used as slave labour.
The anti-communist narrative promotes European exceptionalism to deny the holocausts against the Chinese and Korean people committed by the Japanese militarists and American imperialists and the heroic historic role of the Soviet peoples who suffered the greatest losses during World War II. This anti-communist narrative declares that Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and other countries were freedom fighters for purposes of justifying the crimes that the U.S.-led NATO forces are committing against Russia today and preparing to commit against the peoples of Asia and the world.
This barbarism under new historical circumstances is disinformation which seeks to hide what the ensemble of social relations reveals which is that the task today is to find the means to make sure the crimes of the past are no longer brought into the present in even worse ways. This can already be seen in the wars of destruction the U.S. imperialists and their allies are carrying out in the Middle East and they are threatening in Asia and Latin America. It must not pass!
Note
On January 5, 2018, Latvia’s parliament passed a law which grants the status of World War II “participant” to all those who fought on Latvian soil both in the Soviet Red Army and in the Nazi units of the Third Reich. This is yet another measure to whitewash Nazi criminals and put on par the Latvian SS storm troopers and Red Army veterans who liberated the world from Nazism.
Also, in Poland, a Bill was passed on February 1, 2018, that imposes three-year prison sentences for mentioning the term “Polish death camps.” It also imposes jail terms for suggesting that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) claimed that the Bill is needed to protect Poland’s reputation and ensure that historians recognize that Poles as well as Jews perished under the Nazis. The Bill was overwhelmingly denounced internationally as a denial of historical facts and for criminalizing the discussion of the history of World War II.
(TML Archives)