Fighting on all Fronts (5 page)

Authors: Donny Gluckstein

BOOK: Fighting on all Fronts

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Pointless mass slaughter remained the First World War’s most prominent feature and on the military plane it ended as an “armistice” rather than outright victory for either bloc.

When the propaganda of “national salvation” was exposed as a hollow lie, slogans such as the one issued in Germany by Karl Liebknecht, “The enemy is at home”, or Lenin’s appeal for “revolutionary defeatism”, gained wide popularity despite initial support given to the war by the Second International socialist parties. A mass determination that the fighting must stop led to revolutions that finally ended the conflict. Class war ended imperialist war.

The course of the Second World War was different for a number of reasons. Instead of trenches the Axis used tanks, warplanes and Blitzkrieg tactics to achieve large-scale territorial gains in the early period. Berlin and Tokyo not only broke the states of their rival capitalist competitors; they moved on to exploit subjugated populations using brutal repression justified through racist ideology. This produced a far more complex situation than during the First World War.

In European areas of Axis occupation the invaders initially succeeded in both eliminating local ruling class competition and exploiting their populations. If local rulers chose exile in response, for the mass of people the chief enemy “at home” was Berlin or Tokyo. Where the establishment collaborated with the invader in the hope of being a junior partner in exploitation, there was now a dual enemy “at home”.

For the colonies the severe weakening of the European masters by Axis forces removed imperialist domination of one sort but brought another in the form of Japan’s army.

Many in the Allied heartlands of Britain, the US and the Soviet Union could see that their ruling class’s sole interest in the fight remained the securing of continued domination at home and abroad but they also distinguished between this “normal” system of exploitation and a new threat of untrammelled fascist dictatorship.

Whichever situation applied, the First World War’s precise sequence of working class movement collapse at the outset and outright class war at the end was not replicated in the Second. Instead there was, during the conflict itself, something called “people’s war”, a phenomenon which could mean very different things from place to place. For example, even within the Axis countries where the crippling impact of Nazism, fascism and militarism had been most pronounced, resistance never entirely ceased. Eventual defeat by the Allies created possibilities for a large-scale revival of movements from below which were seized upon but frustrated in Italy and stifled in Germany.

The term “people’s war” is correct but problematic. The phrase was common during the 1939-1945 period and corresponded to the resistance movements, anti-colonial liberation struggles and a host of popular activities which the masses injected into the war process to express their aspiration for an end to oppression and exploitation.

However, the Communist International (Comintern) gave it a peculiar twist to justify Stalinist policy. After Hitler repudiated his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia, Moscow linked itself to London and Washington claiming that Allied governments and masses were waging a “people’s war” against the Axis. Pretending that “we are all in this together” airbrushed away the imperialist motives of those in power.

While the fight against the Axis could mask these tensions temporarily, the fiction of unity was short-lived. Movements from below collided with the aims of Allied governments, who, in their turn, frequently forgot and forgave their erstwhile Axis enemies in order to suppress the masses.

To conclude, the Second World War began as a struggle between rival imperialisms to dominate the globe. It retained this character throughout and no sooner had the struggle between the Axis and the Allies been decided than the Cold War, a new imperialist competition, followed. But if the stamp of imperialism is therefore indelibly marked on this period, so too was its opposite. The people’s war, often in spite of the intentions of those who led it, amounted to a rejection of capitalist imperialism and imperialist capitalism. It represented the struggle of masses of ordinary people for a different, better world.

How the book is organised

Fighting On All Fronts
is organised around national studies divided between the struggles against the Axis in the West and in the East. It begins with a chapter on Algeria which asks whether the Second World War was a war of liberation or a war of domination between competing imperialist powers. The US spearheaded a landing in North Africa to help it in a vicious game involving the British and both anti-Nazi and collaborationist French forces. In the turmoil the opportunity for real liberation driven by the oppressed population of the colony was born. With the announcement of victory over the Axis in Europe, the contested nature of the Second World War was put to the test: Algerians celebrating the defeat of the Axis as the prelude to freedom were gunned down by the French authorities.

Southern Ireland is the only country in this collection to have remained neutral during the Second World War but this did not mean peace. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a bombing campaign to finally expel the British from the whole island. The Irish government did not want its compromise with London disturbed and repressed the IRA. At the same time left wing forces such as the Communist Party wanted Ireland to fight on the British side. The argument put was that the Axis represented imperialist aggression, which was true enough but ignored the imperialist aggression of the Allies. Ireland may have been technically neutral but it was nonetheless drawn into the politics that the conflict reflected.

The chapter on Jews looks at Eastern Europe. Millions fell victim to Nazism but their history has fallen victim to the Zionist project of the Israeli state. This portrays them as surrounded by hostile compatriots and passively submitting to the Holocaust (the sub-text being Jews today must oppress Palestinians to survive). Jews were not a homogenous isolated group; they were internally divided by class and externally linked to class interests. Jewish resistance both fought the Nazis and opposed Jewish Council collaborators. One peak was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In Minsk a peak of a different sort saw a united Jewish and non-Jewish resistance under communist leadership (later repressed by Stalin). The author concludes that: “Jews did not go simply as sheep to the slaughter. They fought back against overwhelming odds and in the face of mass extermination. And they did not do this alone.”

The Netherlands demonstrate how a ruling class, caught between Germany and Britain, worked to balance between the contending forces, its various wings maintaining good relations with both. After the Nazis invaded this was summed up by the announcement that: “the authorities
would strive, in the interest of the population, to continue performing as good a job as possible under the changed circumstances.” While several groups fought occupation, the domestic government sought “business as usual” and the government-in-exile encouraged only limited resistance. Both wings looked to a restoration of the pre-war set-up including Dutch colonies and especially Indonesia.

The Soviet Union proved to be the decisive factor in the defeat of Hitler. Stalin is usually credited with making this possible even if subject to partial criticism. This chapter argues that Stalin’s regime acted like all the other imperialist contenders. His campaigns were as much directed at the survival of the regime through crushing internal opposition as fighting Germany’s invasion of 1941. That the Soviet Union eventually triumphed was due to the heroic efforts of ordinary people and often despite the policies of Stalin. Yet this has been hidden from history. The state’s repressive apparatus was effective in distorting the true story of the Second World War and inventing the powerful myth of Stalin’s greatness.

The final chapter in the Western section traces complex manoeuvres surrounding the Slovak National Uprising. While for ordinary people hatred of home grown fascism and the Nazis encouraged resistance, various competing wings of the Czechoslovak ruling class looked to staying in power through an independent Slovakia or restoring the unitary Czechoslovak state. They were split over whether to collaborate with the Axis or to defy it by relying on London (with its history of appeasement) or Moscow. The latter had its own designs and tried to manipulate these struggles to its advantage. In the maelstrom of competing interests the popular energy of the masses was dissipated in what the author describes as “one of the largest—and shortest—incidents of armed insurrection against Nazi occupation”.

The section on the war in the East begins with Australia. While discussions of the Second World War usually focus on the major powers that headed the Allied and Axis blocs, this chapter looks at the development of an Allied sub-imperialism. It shows that weaker Allied ruling classes shared the same racism, ruthlessness and belligerence as the major powers. War was an opportunity to advance self-interest through colonial expansion and exploitation at home just as much in Australia as it was in Britain, Germany, Japan or the US. This did not go unchallenged. The Australian working class fought back, with women often in the lead. In the armed forces resentment at “brass-hatted stupidity” and support for anti-colonialism presented an alternative worldview to the imperialist aspirations of the rulers.

Events in Burma destroy the conventional narrative of the good democratic Allies versus the evil dictatorial Axis. Divisions between the former imperialist power, Britain, and the up-coming imperialism, Japan, were used by Aung San to forge an independent country at the expense of both. Initially his Burmese Independence Army worked with the Japanese to disrupt British rule and then switched sides when Japan headed for defeat. The complications this manoeuvring presented for the left, with anti-imperialists and/or leftists supporting different sides at the same time, and the contradictions of nationalism in an ethnically diverse country like Burma are explored in this chapter.

China’s experience in the Second World War was unlike that of every other country dealt with in this book because it was superimposed on a pre-existing process of revolutionary transformation which began in 1911 and only ended in 1948 with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. When the Japanese attempted to seize the whole of China in 1937 they found a society already riven by war which set the tiny forces of Mao’s Red Army against the forces of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. This three-cornered territorial and social struggle therefore bore many of the features of war from above and below seen elsewhere but incorporated them into what Trotsky called “permanent revolution”.

The chapter on Japan explodes many myths. Japanese involvement in the Second World War was part of the inter-imperialist struggle in which the USA played as much of a role in provoking conflict as any of the various governments. At the same time the author debunks the notion of Japanese blind obedience to the emperor and passive submission to the government war drive. Despite government repression, industrial struggles, sabotage, mass absenteeism, peasant disturbances, even resistance among kamikaze pilots were witnessed. There were even anti-war demonstrations and defections to independence movements such as those in China and Indonesia.

The final chapter sets the story of the Huk wartime resistance movement in the context of Filipino history. The Huk movement was driven from below and therefore reflects both opposition to Japanese occupation and the social and economic aspirations of urban workers and the peasantry. Although US forces and the Filipino ruling class found it advantageous to use the Huk movement during the war, its radical features made it unpalatable to the establishment post-war. A wave of repression followed while many Japanese collaborators were welcomed into positions of authority.

NOTES

1
F Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(Free Press, 1992).

2
N Henderson,
Failure of a Mission
(London, 1940), p247.

3
Press statement by Churchill in 1927, Churchill Papers, CHAR 9/82B.

4
Quoted in C de Gaulle,
The Complete War Memoirs
(New York, 1998, p55).

5
Pilsudski, quoted in P Hehn,
A Low, Dishonest Decade
(A & C Black, London, 2005), p76.

6
H Williams,
Parachutes, Patriots and Partisans
(London, 2003), p27.

7
Quoted in C Tsoucalas,
The Greek Tragedy
(Harmondsworth, 1969), p55.

8
Quoted in Bernd J Fischer,
Albania at War 1939-1945
(Hurst and Company, London, 1999), p14.

9
D C Watt,
How War Came
(Heinemann, London, 1989), p595.

10
Mass Observation, FR89, April 1940.

11
Mass Observation, FR600, March 1941, p17.