World War II Myths

It is generous to say that the U.S. education system doesn’t place much of an emphasis on learning history. Knowing history breeds learning about current policy (before it becomes history), discussing it (politics for the layman? absurd) and, worst of all, questioning it. The typical American history education during the 70s and 80s included years of repetition of the same 75 years during the founding of the U.S., coverage of the Civil War, some stuff about the Arch Duke Ferdinand and WWI, D-Day as the complete coverage of WWII and that’s it. No Eastern front in WWII, barely any Pacific theater, no Korea, no Vietnam. Nothing. Given that context, it’s not hard to see why Americans are so easily led by the nose with respect to WWII “legends” fabricated to impugn communism for fascism’s evils.

It was rampaging fascism/racism that sought to conquer the world in WWII. Communism or, more accurately, it’s forerunner, Bolshevism, was an ally and lost twice as many people as the rest of the world combined in order to prevent the world from succumbing to Hitler’s twisted future.

The American Myth Industry by William Blum (CounterPunch) tries to right some of the obvious wrongs babbled forth by Bush* during his recent tour of Europe for the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII. In particular, the facts of WWII have been rewritten to make it appear that Russia was in cahoots with the Nazis and took over eastern Europe for purely expansionist reasons.

*Which, as noted above, isn’t Bush’s fault. His handlers probably don’t even know what actually happened in WWII.

• The Soviet Union signed a pact with the devil, Nazi Germany, in 1939 for no reason other than the commies and the Nazis were just two of a kind who wanted to carve up Poland together.
• Without any justification, the Soviet Union occupied the three Baltic nations in 1940.
• Without any justification the Soviet Union occupied the rest of Eastern Europe after the Second World War.

IN actuality, the Russians “were forced into the pact by the repeated refusal of the Western powers, particularly the United States and Great Britain, to sign a mutual defense treaty with Moscow in a stand against Hitler”. You see, the U.S. and Britain thought it was just hunky dory to let Nazi Germany steamroll Russia because they were dirty pinko-commies who thought they could step outside of the purview of Western hegemony. It is here that America employs a most time-worn trick: accuse your enemy of your own crimes in order to deflect inquiry and suspicion. Since the U.S. and Britain were happy to let the ravening, German war machine annihilate the Russians, it is far more accurate to accuse them of collusion than the Russians. Communist Spain was similarly left to its own devices.

“Hitler derived an important lesson from these happenings. He saw that for the West the real enemy was not fascism, it was communism and socialism. Stalin got the same message.”

From then on (1939), both Russia and Spain, weakened massively during the war, would suffer under the thumbs of brutal totalitarian dictators (Stalin and Franco, respectively).

This attitude towards communism began from the very first moments of the revolution in Russia, when the Bolsheviks took over. The West was immediately aware of the possible effects on their own market economy, which requires constant growth and external markets to subjugate in order to survive. So, it was already at the end of WWI that the first attacks on Russia by the U.S. began.

“When [WWI] ended in November 1918, and the Germans had been defeated, the victorious Allies (US, Great Britain, France, et al.) permitted/encouraged the German forces to remain in the Baltics for a full year to crush the spread of Bolshevism there; this, with ample military assistance from the Allies.”

When viewed all at once, it is impossible not to come to the conclusion that the Russians had been betrayed time and again by their “allies”. Given that the betrayal always came from the West, what choice did Russia really have but to close off the avenue of attack?

“Within the space of 25 years, Western powers invaded Russia three times — World War I, 1914-18; the “intervention” of 1918-20; and World War II, 1939-45 — inflicting some 40 million casualties in the two world wars alone. … To carry out these invasions, the West used Eastern Europe as a highway. Should it be any cause for wonder that after World War II the Soviets wanted to close this highway down?”

It is only with careful vetting of history that Americans can possibly believe that the Soviet Union acted out of pure evil in securing the Eastern Bloc; if it were the U.S., this action would be easily justifiable, even noble.

Further reading

The War in Europe − What really happened? by James Heartfield is a relatively succinct coverage of the class issues involved in WWII. There, one learns that the rigid impositions placed on workers by the fascist powers was envied by the capitalist democracies. They saw it as a way of controlling labor to maximize profits for corporations (see the allies conservative influence for details of how fascist/Nazi sympathizers were kept in power after the war in order to suppress the natural worker/socialist backlash against fascism in Italy, Greece and other countries).

In net effect, the U.S. managed to push itself to the top of world order by taking advantage of the damage Germany did to existing empires. Instead of freeing the world’s peoples from subjugation, the U.S. thought it better to maintain the pecking order of nation states, but with itself at the top. The freedom and democracy of the people were popular marketing slogans, but had little to do with the hierarchy that emerged from the wreckage of WWII. Germany started WWII to take over the world, but it was the U.S. that carried the ball into the end zone (see Restoring the nation-state and Restoring the empire).

“The difference between the reaction to the end of the First World War and the second is striking: in 1918, a significant section of the working class knew that they had been beaten, and wanted to do something about it; with the re-establishment of capitalist reproduction in 1945 the entire working class movement thought that they had won a great victory. That conviction was the ruling classes’ greatest achievement.”