Never Again!

The slogan used by liberated prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp to denounce Nazism is always recalled on 27th January, now known as Holocaust Day. That was the day in 1945 when the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops advancing into the Third Reich.
Millions, including some six million Jews, suffered and died in that unspeakable horror. And this year, on the 80th anniversary of its liberation King Charles joined world and religious leaders to mourn those who perished in Nazi death camps to pledge that future generations must never allow the horrors of the Holocaust to be forgotten or repeated. But the role of the Soviet Union that liberated Auschwitz is being deliberately ignored by the imperialists and their lackeys that use Holocaust Day to justify their own moral bankruptcy. 
The decision to exclude Russia from Auschwitz’s 80th  anniversary commemorations sends a troubling message to the world about the value of historical truth. When we start erasing inconvenient aspects of history to suit present-day narratives we lose sight of the lessons that history teaches us. The Holocaust and the broader atrocities of the Second World War  were enabled by dehumanisation, propaganda, and the denial of reality. To combat these forces in our time we must commit to an honest reckoning with the past even when it is uncomfortable.
Selective amnesia is dangerous. The Second World War was a global conflict that required immense sacrifices from the Allied Powers that combined to defeat Nazi Germany and its Axis allies. But no country paid a higher price than the USSR. Over 27 million Soviet citizens died in the war including 8,7 million battlefield losses. To erase or diminish that contribution is to distort the historical record and risk undermining the shared understanding that has underpinned the post-war international order.
 It is undoubtedly true that the Holocaust was perpetrated in a climate of anti-semitism and abhorrent racism deliberately fostered by the Nazis and the German ruling class. The Nazis didn’t invent anti-semitism but they stoked it up and fanned the flames to make pogroms seem respectable and even "patriotic". But it was not the existence of racist ideas on their own which led to Nazism and the “final solution” but the ruling class of finance capitalists which wanted war and territorial expansion.
 It was this class which used the Nazis to advance its aims and which systematically elevated racism – and particularly anti-semitism – in order to find an excuse for wholesale theft, super exploitation and war to provide a convenient internal enemy on which the attention of the people could be focused.
The Nazis said the Jews were to blame for people's ills. They said that it was the Jews who bled the country dry. They claimed that the Jews were the enemies of the Germans and the entire human race.These lies were told in order to conceal the real exploiters and parasites –  the capitalist class as a whole. It ensured that capitalism was not blamed while millions of innocent Jews, most of whom were working class, were persecuted.
The leading German bankers, manufacturers and other big capitalists made a great deal of money from the war itself and from forced labour and the camp system in general. They survived the fall of the Third Reich largely unscathed and some of their successors are still leaders in the field today.
 Yes; we should all learn from the Holocaust. We should learn to struggle against every form of racism. But we should also learn that it was capitalism which backed Hitler, it is capitalism which resorts to unleashing fascism when it cannot rule in the old way and it was capitalism which created the gas chambers of Auschwitz – these are the lessons of history.

Rocket Wars

by Ben Soton

V2 by Robert Harris. London: Hutchinson (2020). Hardback: 320pp; rrp £20.00. Paperback:320pp; rrp £10.99.

Historical fiction is a good way of learning historical facts; more people died making the V2 missile than were killed by it. Its victims included 200,000 slave labourers as well as 2,700 civilian casualties mostly in greater London. With this in mind its creator Wernher Von Braun, who was after all an officer in the SS, should have been put on trial for war crimes. The V2 rocket, correct name Retribution Weapon II is the subject and title of Robert Harris latest novel. The novel revolves around two opposing groups of people; those who launched it and those employed to stop it.
    Kay Caton-Walsh, an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) is part of a group of women using mathematical formulae to calculate the location of the V2 launch sites. She is stationed in the northern Belgian town of Mechelen, recently liberated by the allies. Kay is led astray by vivacious friend Barbara; a touch of Bletchley Girls meets Sex and the City. The local population is desperately short of food and it is difficult to know who to trust. Around eight thousand Belgians joined the Walloon Legion; later integrated into the SS and responsible for numerous atrocities in the Soviet Union.
     Although it was largely destroyed by Soviet forces in the Korsun–Cherkassy Pocket in February 1944 its founder Leon Degrelle saw the SS as the first European Army. Are there any more reasons why Remainers should shut themselves away in darkened rooms and hang their heads in shame?
    Ninety-four miles away in the Dutch town of Scheveningen, close to the Hague is Dr Rudi Graf. His job is to launch the V2s. Graf’s story is intertwined with innocent boyhood dreams of space travel, combined with disillusionment with an evil and soon to be defeated regime. Much of Graf’s story concentrates on the technical failings of the V2 and as the novel reaches its climax Graf struggles continually harder with his conscience.
    V2 was written in the first lockdown in the spring of 2020. There are no doubt parallels between today’s NHS workers in the fight against Covid-19 and those, like the WAAF who worked in the backrooms of World War II to limit the damage done by V-weapons. Harris, despite his dreadful politics is still a master of historical fiction and V2 is no exception.

The Soviet sacrifice remembered in Durham

By New Worker correspondent

Students studying Russian held a literary and musical evening dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Second World War at Durham University last weekend. The students gave reports on key events of the war, read poems and sang songs about important battles and victory.
    Olga Zabotkina, who proposed the memorial evening, told the students about the members of her family who fought in the Great Patriotic War and the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in the struggle against the Nazi invaders.
    An important part of the evening was the performance of works of art and music about the War. For the convenience of the audience, during the performance of songs, words were dubbed in Latin letters and video materials were shown with translation into English.
    The participants of the evening received St George ribbons and letters of thanks from the General Convent of Russia in Edinburgh. They plan to continue their work and hold a concert in honour of the Year of Memory and Glory in Russia.

 

 

A remarkable life

Review

by Ben Soton

Billy Strachan by David Horsley. Caribbean Labour Solidarity, £2. Copies of this booklet are available from David Horsley: ukdavid.d@gmail.com

What images come to mind on hearing the word anti-imperialism? Maybe Latin American guerrillas, beautiful Palestinian hijackers, an African carrying a rocket launcher, or maybe a fighter in the jungles of South east Asia or the mountains of Nepal.

Often forgotten are the peoples of the Caribbean who originated from Africa. Victims of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, taken from West Africa from the 17th century onwards to work in the plantations of the Caribbean and Southern US states.

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, itself a crime against humanity, kick-started the industrial revolution in Europe. When some of their descendants arrived in Britain after the Second World War racists claimed they were “taking our jobs”. Had it not been for the suffering of their descendants these jobs would not have existed! One of these people was Billy Strachan.

Billy Strachan was born in Jamaica on 16 April 1921. After serving in the RAF as a navigator during the war, he settled in Britain in 1947. A life-long communist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist, Strachan was a founding member of the Caribbean Labour Congress (CLC).  The CLC was founded during the Second World War with the aim of representing the interests of Caribbean workers in Britain, campaigning for the independence of Caribbean nations and orienting them towards socialism.

The CLC, through its publication Caribbean News, was in the forefront of anti-racist campaigns in Britain and Solidarity with the Caribbean people against imperialism.

In 1953 the CLC was in the forefront of opposition to the illegal overthrown of the left-wing government of Guyana by British imperialism. It also showed solidarity with the people of Kenya and against Apartheid in South Africa. The CLC, along with Caribbean News, collapsed in 1956 however, due to disagreements over the direction of the organisation.

Despite this setback Strachan continued with his political activism. He was a life-long communist and supporter of socialist Cuba as well as numerous progressive campaigns. In 1959 he qualified as a barrister and wrote a number of legal books, including The Drink Driver and The Law (1973). He also wrote the influential pamphlet Sugar, The Story of a Colony published by Caribbean News in 1955.

The author argues that Strachan, despite his great contribution to anti-racism and anti-imperialism, has so-far been written out of history. He cites a number of publications, including Peter Fryer’s Staying Power – A History of Black People in Britain, which make no mention of Strachan. In the introduction he suggests that Strachan’s communist politics resulted in him being ignored by historians. It is for this reason that a publication celebrating his life is long overdue.

The Longest Day

Although we were promised vast spectacles on 6^th June to mark the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landings earlier in the month, the commemorative events were clearly overshadowed by the hostile reception to President Trump in London and the Brexit crisis that brought down Theresa May, who formally stepped down as Prime Minister the day after.

Donald Trump joined the Queen and some other NATO politicians for a ceremony in Portsmouth and the signing of a pointless joint statement that committed its 16 signatories to “work constructively as friends and allies to find common ground”, even where their opinions differ, and "to work together to resolve international tensions peacefully”. Apart from Trump, the only other heads of state and government at the ceremony were French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The Russians were pointedly not invited to the Portsmouth event nor to the Battle of Normandy celebrations held across the Channel on the same day.

The Normandy landings did, of course, hasten the end of the Third Reich but they weren’t in themselves the deciding factor in the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was the Red Army that even Winston Churchill said had "torn the guts out of the Nazi war machine" on the eastern front during the Second World War. Churchill, of course, was a rabid anti-communist, who saw the alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union as a marriage of convenience that would end as soon as the Nazi threat was over.

It was only when the Hitler’s Wehrmacht was on the run that Anglo-American imperialism moved towards a ‘Second Front’. Fearing that the Soviet army would soon liberate the entire European continent, their forces landed in France and fought their way to western Germany.

It is always important to remember the sacrifice of all those who fought in the struggle against fascism during the Second World War. The Normandy landings liberated France and hastened the end of Hitler’s regime. But it was the sacrifice of the Soviet people of all nationalities who rallied to the call to defend their socialist motherland that brought Hitler to his knees. Over 20 million Soviet citizens, including the flower of their youth, died in the epic struggle to defeat the brutal Nazi war-machine – a struggle that ended in victory over Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945.