We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .

We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.1

Ronald Reagan, US President 1981-89, in

a statement in October 1965.

I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever

called me ‘nigger’.2

Muhammed Ali, on why he refused the draft.

In Vietnam the mighty US army suffered its one and only major defeat, so far.

How was this possible? Was it the guerrilla war in Vietnam combined with student struggle in the US that was responsible? This is commonly how it is presented, but in reality it was the struggle of the American working class that decided the issue.

The US comes to Vietnam

Vietnam became a French colony in middle of the nineteenth century. Dur­ing the Second World War Vietnam was occupied by Japan. After a crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, France was forced to pull out of Vietnam, ending a century of colonial rule. The Vietnamese Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh was poised to take control of the country.

China and the Soviet Union probably feared that such a setback would be too hard to swallow for imperialism and might upset the Cold War balance of terror between the great powers. Instead of letting the French army pull out, they insisted on a settlement that would compel Ho Chi Minh to withdraw his troops to North Vietnam, and leaving the French occupying the south. France would continue to administer the southern part of the country until a general election in 1956, and the victor at that poll would then rule the entire country.

The US president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, said later that he be­lieved Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 per cent of the vote.3 So, a general election was never called. Ngo Ding Diem, a Vietnamese living in the US, was flown to Vietnam and installed in office instead. By injecting massive political, economic and military support, the US created a new state in South Vietnam. This state then began to attack both the opposition in the south and North Vietnam.4

The American government did not want another country to leave its sphere of influence. Moreover, traditional imperialist interests played a part. The conservative newspaper U.S. News and World Report carried an article headed Why the US is risking war in Indochina. It explained: “One of the world’s rich­est areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That’s behind the growing U.S. concern … tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really all about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold – at any cost.”5

The war was also about the export of capital, i.e. the exploitation of cheap labour. This is how the influential magazine Business Week expressed it in 1963: “Late in the 1940’s – and with increasing speed all through the 1950’s and up to the present – (in) industry after industry, U.S. companies found that their overseas earnings were soaring, and that their return on invest­ment was frequently much higher than in the U.S.”6

In South Vietnam, the Communist Party organised a guerrilla army, the NLF (National Liberation Front), to fight Diem and the US. Due to the extensive support from the population, particularly in rural areas, the guer­rillas were able to carry out rapid attacks and then vanish back into the jun­gle. Increasingly, the Americans response was to terrorise the population in order to get at the guerrillas. By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral part of the CIA’s campaign in South Vietnam.7

Operation Rolling Thunder and the Tet Offensive

As the South Vietnamese government proved incapable of defeating the guerrillas, the US was drawn deeper into the war. American military inter­vention in Vietnam began in 1963. In August of that year, US President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. Six months later, Operation Rolling Thunder got under way. In that campaign alone – which lasted for five years – more bombs were dropped on North Viet­nam than were used throughout the Second World War. This corresponds to about 150 kilos of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam.8 Two million Vietnamese and 50 000 American soldiers were to die in this war. The trees across 10% of the country’s surface were defoliated with the help of toxins, primarily Agent Orange, in a bid to get at the guerrillas, who used the jungle as cover.9

The number of American soldiers in Vietnam rose from 23,300 in 1963 to 184 000 in 1966. In January 1969, their number peaked – at 542 000. Despite this, the US was unable to subdue the country. And on the night of 31 January 1968, the North Vietnamese army and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive. The guerrillas broke the truce they had promised to observe during the Vietnamese New Year celebrations, and stormed into more than 100 cities and towns, having first launched a diversionary attack in Khesan province. One of their targets was the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.

The Americans were caught by surprise by the Tet Offensive, and the NLF even managed to take over the US embassy in the capital. They had accu­mulated weapons, ammunition and explosives at a secret location in prepa­ration for the attack. In the middle of the night, a group of guerrilla soldiers drove up to the embassy in a taxi. Within minutes they had shot the Marines on guard and taken control of the building. The guerrillas also stormed the headquarters of the US and the South Vietnamese armies, as well as the giant US army base at Bienhoa, north of Saigon airport. Fourteen guerrilla soldiers attacked the leading radio station in Saigon. After having controlled it for 18 hours, they blew themselves and the entire building into the air. The NLF also made a half-hearted attempt to stage an uprising in urban areas. The response was very limited.

The size and range of the Offensive astounded the American generals. One of them said later the pattern of attack on the map resembled a pinball game, with lights flashing for each raid. Without doubt, this was one of the most daring and remarkable campaigns in military history. The North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap had begun preparations for it in 1967 when he realised that the war had reached a military deadlock.

In military terms, the Tet Offensive was not a success. The NLF lost over 50 000 fighters, as compared to 6 000 Americans and South Vietnamese. The NLF also lost almost its entire command structure in South Vietnam. Within days, the guerrillas had been driven out of most of the positions they had captured.

The Tet Offensive was both the high point of guerrilla activity and the beginning of the NLF’s marginalisation in the continuing war. It was the regular North Vietnamese army that took over most of the fighting in the south after the Tet Offensive.

The Offensive nonetheless represented a vital turning point in other re­spects. It had a strong impact on working-class opinion back in the US and internationally. For the first time, Americans were effected by the crucial role television can play in a major war. Fifty million viewers saw the devas­tation caused by war. The US administration could no longer present it as a nice, clean operation that would soon be over. Then, when news of the Song My massacre (in the small village of My Lai) began to leak out in the media, opposition to the war grew dramatically.

The Song My massacre

At dawn on 16 March 1968, a group of American soldiers moved into My Lai. Between 450 and 500 people, mainly old men, women and children, were slain:

“Those Vietnamese who were not killed on the spot were being shepherded by the first platoon to a large drainage ditch at the eastern end of the hamlet. After Grzesik left, Meadlo and a few others gathered seven or eight villagers in one hut and were pre­paring to toss in a hand grenade when an order came to take them to the ditch. There he found Calley, along with a dozen other first platoon members, and perhaps seventy-five Vietnamese, mostly women, old men and children. Calley then turned his attention back to the crowd of Vietnamese and issued an order: “Push all those people in the ditch.” Three or four GIs complied. Calley struck a woman with a rifle as he pushed her down. Stanley re­membered that some of the civilians “kept trying to get out. Some made it to the top. . . .” Calley began the shooting and ordered Meadlo to join in. Meadlo told about it later: “So we pushed our seven to eight people in with the big bunch of them. And so I began shooting them all. So did Mitchell, Calley… I guess I shot maybe twenty-five or twenty people in the ditch . . . men, women and children. And babies.” Some of the GIs switched from auto­matic fire to single-shot to conserve ammunition. Herbert Carter watched the mothers “grabbing their kids and the kids grabbing their mothers. I didn’t know what to do.”

(…)

Some GIs. . . didn’t hesitate to use their bayonets. Nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open her slain mother’s blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was struggling with the blouse, and the slashed at it with his bayo­net. Tuyet also said she saw another baby hacked to death by GIs wielding their bayonets. Le Tong, a twenty-eight-year-old rice farmer, reported seeing one woman raped after GIs killed her children . Nguyen Khoa, a thirty-seven- year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped before being killed. GIs then attacked Khoa’s wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however, Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with bullets, fell and saturated her with blood. The GIs left her alone . . . .

In the early afternoon the men of Charlie Company mopped up to make sure all the houses and goods in My Lai 4 were destroyed. Medina ordered the underground tunnels in the hamlet blown up; most of them already had been blocked. Within another hour My Lai 4 was no more: its red-brick buildings demolished by explo­sives, its huts burned to the ground, its people dead or dying.”10

It later transpired that officers higher up were responsible both for the massacre, and for the attempts to cover it up. However, only four soldiers were brought to trial and only one of them, William Calley, was convicted. After three years of house arrest, he was pardoned by President Nixon and released. The Song My outrage was one of the more brutal events of the war, but the abuse and killing of civilians was commonplace. In for example Operation Speedy Express focused on the Mekong Delta in early 1969, the US army claimed that 10,899 enemies were killed. Yet only 784 weapons were seized.11

It was not until 13 November 1969, more than one and half years after the event, that the true story of what happened at Song My emerged in the American media. As the war continued, American journalists increasingly dared to tell the truth about the Vietnam War. This was because public opinion more and more swung against the war. A few years earlier, journal­ists would have been fired if they had ventured to report the facts. But by the end of 1969, such persecution would have led to an uproar.

US national security adviser Henry Kissinger realised after the Tet Offen­sive that: “Regardless of how effective our actions are, the present strategy can no longer reach its goals within the period or with the level of force that is acceptable to the American Public.”12 The US is a highly developed country where the working class makes up the overwhelming bulk of the population. It is the working class that is the American public.

Initially, just as at the invasion of Iraq, many workers supported the Viet­nam War. However, that declined as the war continued. A look at which groups expressed the greatest dissatisfaction is particularly interesting. A Gallup poll conducted in January 1971 showed that 60% of those with a college education advocated withdrawing the troops from Vietnam and 75% with a high school education supported such a move, while as many as 80% of those with only an elementary education were in favour. These facts have become completely obscured.13

At a popular exhibition entitled Resistance at Stockholm’s modern art mu­seum, Moderna Museet, the only picture showing workers was one of American construction workers in hard hats beating up protesting students. The exhibition was supposed to be about struggle from the 1960s onwards. The impression it gave was that the only Americans principled enough to stand up against US imperialism were students and a handful of courageous individuals.

On a number of occasions in the 1990s people were asked to estimate what percentages of people at different educational levels were against the war in 1971. They estimated that 90% of all those with a college education were against the war, and that just 60% of those with only an elementary educa­tion were opposed to it.14 An almost complete reversal of the facts.

The working class pays, the rich benefit

The American workers’ opposition to the war was based primarily on their own experiences. It was their children who were called on to do the dirty work in Vietnam. And it was their children who came home in a body bag, or maimed or mentally disturbed, because of a war that was not their own – a war that in no way benefited them. The children of the rich were often able to avoid being drafted as they were studying at university (students were exempted from the draft), or alternatively they were given comfortable jobs as officers far from the horrors of war. Also, it was the workers who paid for most of the war, via their taxes.

A total of 2 590 000 Americans took part in the war at one time or another. Inevitably, there was interaction between them and the working class back home. The soldiers influenced their thinking, and vice versa. Many return­ing soldiers could doubtless agree with the following description, published in June 1971, of how far resistance had developed within the US military.

“The morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous… While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assess­ment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous sup­port in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career non-commissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

(…)

- They have set up separate companies, writes an American sol­dier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, for men who refuse to go into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don’t even put on their uniforms any more… The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key…There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion. …

‘Frag incidents’ or just ‘fragging’ is current soldier slang in Viet­nam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs….Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of cer­tain units…Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1 000, have been widely re­ported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.

Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, G.I. Says, publicly offered a $10 000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the of­ficer who ordered (and led) the attack.

(…)

The issue of ‘combat refusal’, an official euphemism for diso­bedience of orders to fight – the soldier’s gravest crime, has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry’s mass refusal to recapture their captain’s command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cav­alry Division, flatly refused – on CBS-TV – to advance down a dangerous trail…’Search and evade’ (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, ‘CYA (cover your ass) and get home!’

That ’search-and-evade’ has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation’s recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been or­dered not to engage American units which do not molest them.”

This account was published just six months before the US began withdraw­ing its ground troops and Nixon initiated his Vietnamisation policy (meaning that American soldiers were no longer to be directly involved in the fighting). The quote is from the Armed Forces Journal, an official army publication, and is included in a book by the eminent military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr.15 Heinl is not alone in writing about the disintegration of the American military. Such accounts have almost become a genre in their own right.16

Another example: “During the years of 1969 down to 1973, we have the rise of fragging – that is, shooting or hand-grenading your NCO or your officer who orders you out into the field. (…) The US Army itself does not know exactly how many … officers were murdered. But they know at least 600 were murdered, and then they have another 1 400 that died mys­teriously. Consequently, by early 1970, the army [was] at war not with the enemy but with itself’.”17

It was not the brutality of war as such that led to the disintegration of the US Army. The important thing in war is for soldiers to believe in what they are doing. During the Second World War, many soldiers were willing to fight fascism and defend democracy. However much US propaganda sought to present the Vietnam War as a fight for a better world, it soon became clear to the soldiers involved that this was not what the war was about. At the end of the Second World War, too, American soldiers had reacted rebelliously to government efforts to re-deploy them to fight the Communists in Italy and elsewhere.

Back home in the US, ordinary workers were strongly influenced by what their sons and brothers had experienced in Vietnam. And they did not just sit back and await developments. As early as 1965, some 25 000 people gathered in Washington, 20 000 in New York and 15 000 in Berkeley, Cali­fornia, to protest against the war. In April 1967, as many as 300 000 people demonstrated in New York.

A series of ‘moratoriums’18 were organised throughout the US by the two largest anti-war organisations. The largest of these protests took place on 15 October 1969. An estimated five million people took part in it in one way or another. They joined demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins and other organised activities. Some people did only small things, like lighting a candle or leaving their headlights on. In New York, the mayor proclaimed a day of mourning and ordered public flags to be flown at half mast. Soldiers in Vietnam also demonstrated their support, by wearing black armbands.

The largest demonstrations took place on 24 April 1971. 300 000 people assembled in San Francisco, and in Washington between 500 000 and 700 000. This was probably the largest political demonstration in the history of the country – at least up until 15 February 2003 when a million people gathered in New York to protest against the war in Iraq.

Protests were also organised at universities. During the post-war economic upswing, US universities and colleges had increasingly opened up, and by the late 1960s the students included millions of young people from work­ing-class backgrounds. Many of the largest and most militant protests took place at universities that were not Ivy League and could hardly be described as the preserve of the rich: Kent State, San Francisco State, and the state-run universities in Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin. In the early 1970s, however, these protests began to wane. Different left-wing sects came to dominate the student movement and tear it apart with fruitless arguments. The anti-war movement, by contrast, now began to attract a great deal of support from organised workers.

The position of the Labour Movement

In the 1930s, the US Labour Movement grew in strength and became radi­calised at an astonishing speed. In the 1950s, however, union bureaucrats dominated. Ordinary workers were showing less inclination to take part in union activities, partly because their situation had improved but also be­cause of the hysterical anti-Communist mood in the early years of the Cold War. In the 1960s, union activities picked up again. Although the workers were better off financially, they were still doing the same dirty jobs and were still being ordered around by dictatorial managers. Many strikes ensued, not least in heavy industry, and the labour unions launched recruiting drives among farm workers, hospital staff and white-collar workers. But the union bureaucracy was a millstone around the movement’s neck.

The bureaucracy was personified by George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union confederation in the world. He made no bones about his opinion regarding the Vietnam War. In May 1965, he declared that the AFL-CIO would support the war “no matter what the academic do-gooders may say, no matter what the apostles of appeasement may say”.19 In August 1966, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO issued the statement that: “Those who would deny our military forces unstinting support are, in effect, aiding the Communist enemy of our country – at the very moment when it is bearing the heaviest burdens in the defence of world peace and freedom”.20

It is not easy for an opposition to make its voice heard when it is openly harassed and persecuted. In 1967, a resolution opposing the war was brought before the AFL-CIO Congress. 2 000 delegates voted against the resolution, six in favour. But in June 1969 the United Auto Workers, UAW, quit the AFL-CIO and set up the Alliance for Labor Action together with the Teamsters (transport workers). The Alliance called for an immediate end to the war.

As time passed, a growing number of labour unions came out against the Vi­etnam War. Individual unions began openly supporting anti-war demonstra­tions, and new members flocked to join them. By 1972, unions representing 4 million of the country’s 21 million workers had officially declared their opposition to the war. At the 1972 presidential election, half of all ‘union households’ voted for the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, who was demanding an immediate troop withdrawal from Vietnam. They did so despite the fact that for the first time in the organisation’s history, Meany had refused to give AFL-CIO support to the Democratic candidate.

However, the ground had begun to shake beneath Meany’s feet. The number of strikes, including wildcat strikes, increased. Even the traditional­ly conservative construction workers did not behave the way in which they were usually presented in the media. In June 1970, a reporter accompanied a group of activists visiting building sites in Chicago to distribute anti-war leaflets. He saw that 90% of the workers the activists talked to were against the war, and almost all felt it was really stupid to assault students for their opposition to it.21

The logic of the anti-war movement was such that people began to feel sympathy for the Vietnamese. In July 1977, an opinion poll asked the ques­tion: “Assuming that the President recommended helping Vietnam, would you like your representative in Congress to approve a plan to send food and medicine there?” 60% said yes and only 29% no.22

In the United States, no parliaments were stormed, no barricades were built and no presidents were deposed (at least not until two years after the US military had been pulled out). Nor was the working class well organ­ised and consciously fighting for a new society, such as the Swedish work­ing class when they ended the attempt to go to war in 1905, or the Russian working class in 1917, or the German in 1918. But special circumstances that have existed neither before nor since meant that the Vietnam War was ended nonetheless.

The movement of the Vietnamese people was part of the anti-colonial struggle that had successfully swept through the world in previous decades. This gave the Vietnamese people self-confidence and moral support from all who had been through a similar experience. They were strengthened further because they were not only fighting to get rid of something, but were also struggling for a better society. A society that they could see had improved the lot of many poor countries throughout the world. They were prepared to fight to the bitter end. The Cold War meant that they got large supplies of weapons from the Soviet Union.

Although Vietnam was a good place for capitalist exploitation, it was not of vital economic importance to US imperialism. A section of the American capitalists therefore began to feel that it might be better to cut their losses, when the war dragged on. The resolve of the American establishment to continue the war was further sapped by international protests. Giant rallies against the US war effort in Vietnam attracted workers and young people throughout the world, not least in Sweden, where the anti-war movement united the left. Olof Palme, then a government minister, caused an interna­tional sensation by joining a demonstration alongside the North Vietnam­ese ambassador.

In military terms, American military power was far superior to the Viet­namese. The US controlled the air space and could go on bombing for as long as they wished. Although the war was expensive, and was beginning to affect the economy, they still could have gone on for years. But the war could not be financed if the working class refused to pay for it. Nor could it be maintained if the working class refused to fight.

The American Labour Movement is, in some respects, different to the Eu­ropean. It is less organised and not as strong, but that also means that the bureaucracy is relatively weak. There is no Labour Party. The Communist Party has hardly any influence. There is no tradition of reformism and Sta­linism. In Europe the reformist leadership within the movement has been the main hindrance to the anti-war movement ever since the outbreak of the First World War, and the Stalinist bureaucracies since the degeneration of the Soviet Union. The small bureaucracy in the US Labour Movement is openly pro-capitalist. When American workers began to question official truths, there was almost nobody with authority to get them ‘on track’ again, i.e. almost nobody who could play the role of an ‘honest broker’ between the demands of the workers and the wishes of the capitalists. Almost noth­ing can dampen class conflicts once they break out. Had the American Government sought to press ahead with the war, the US would have been on the brink of revolution.

In 1975, after 28 years of war, imperialism was finally forced to leave Viet­nam. Once again the independent movement of the working class was deci­sive for defeating imperialism. Given the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese (backed up by many national liberation struggles throughout the Third World), the protests of the Labour Movement internationally, the weakness of the Labour bureaucracy in the US, the fact that US imperialism could afford to let Vietnam go, meant that the American workers opposition to the war brought the troops home.

__________________________________

1 www.vietnamwar.net/quotations/quotations.htm

2 www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Common_Courage_Press/WhoControlsHeroes.html

3 The memoirs of President Eisenhower: Mandate for Change, 1963

4 Robert K. Brigham: Battlefield Vietnam: A brief history. http://www.pbs.org/

battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html

5 US News and World Report, 4 April 1954. www.plp.org/vietnam/vn6.html

6 20 April, 1963. Ibid.

7 Douglas Valentine: Fragging Bob, 2001

8 Steve Forrest: The Tet Offensive.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/1968/vietnam.html

9 Jim Hensman: Vietnam 1945, 1986

10 Seymour Hirsch: My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, 1970

11 Christopher Hitchens: The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2001

12 Steve Forrest: The Tet Offensive,

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/1968/vietnam.html

13 BBC: War and protest – the US in Vietnam (1971),

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A715051

14 James Loewen: Lies My Teacher Told Me, 1995

15 Robert D. Heinl J: The Collapse of the Armed Forces, 1971

16 See for instance GI Resistance: Soldiers and Veterans Against the Viet Nam War.

A Bibliography, 1991

17 http://home.mweb.co.za/re/redcap/vietcrim.htm, unofficial website of the US Army’s

military police

18 A moratorium is defined in the dictionary as an agreed suspension of activity.

19 http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Reviews/Smetak_US_

Labor_01.html

20 http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Reviews/Smetak_US_

Labor_02.html

21 Phillip Foner: US Labor and the Vietnam War, 1989

22 New York Times/CBS News

War and Resistance is a translation of the Swedish book Draksådd, originally published in 2004. It analyzes the most important wars of the past hundred years. It examines the role of UN, civil disobedience and many other failed attempts to stop war. And as a contrast explains why other forms of resistance to war have been successful. This is Chapter 9.

It takes a whole night

to make a day

Javed Shaheen

Pakistani poet

The Arab people have for centuries shared a common language, reli­gion, culture and history. They lived in a territory that extended from Iraq in the east to Mauritania in the west. During medieval times their ru­lers were strong rivals to many European powers. But after that they went into a period of decline and were occupied by the Ottoman Empire, cen­tred on Turkey, and later Britain, France, Italy and Spain. To stop a new po­werful Arab nation emerging has always been a top priority of imperialism. For a long time they have skilfully used the game of divide and rule as me­ans to this end.

Various leaders in the region have played along with this, hoping thereby to maintain themselves in power. This has lead to one war after the other. But despite this, every once in a while, unity has been forged between workers of different religions and nationalities.

Divide and rule

When Turkey allied itself with Germany in the First World War, the Bri­tish promised the Arabs independence as a means of gaining their support against Germany. In October 1915, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, wrote to the Sherif (Emir) of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali, declaring that “Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca”.1

In June 1916, Husayn led an Arab uprising and, together with the British, marched north to throw the Ottoman forces out of Trans-Jordan, Palesti­ne and Syria. The British forces were led by T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”.

But the British had no intention of allowing a strong Arab nation to deve­lop. Even before Husayn’s rebellion, they had reached a secret understan­ding with France and Russia. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, as it was known as, was made public by the Soviet government after the Russian revolution.2 Drawing lines on a map, the three big powers divided up the Arab region into spheres of interest.

Areas roughly equivalent to present-day Lebanon and Syria were to be­long to France. Jordan and Iraq fell to Britain, and Palestine was to be jo­intly administered by the British, French and Russians. The Agreement also allowed a limited autonomy for Arabs in some parts of the region, but Husayn inb Ali’s plans for an independent Arab nation were never even considered.

The British also sought the support of Jewish leaders in the First World War. After the successful Arab uprising against the Ottoman rulers, Lord Balfour, the British home secretary, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, le­ader of the Jewish community in Britain. In this letter , the so called Balfo­ur Declaration, he wrote that Britain would do its best to facilitate the esta­blishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Most Jews, however, were not interested in settling in Palestine at this time. In 1914, 660 000 of the 800 000 Palestinian population were Muslims, a tenth were Christians, and less than a tenth were Jews.3

After the First World War, the League of Nations implemented the Sykes-Picot Agreement in all but name, apart from giving Palestine entirely to the British in 1920. Arab uprisings against this continued more or less througho­ut the period between the two world wars, causing Britain and France to reli­nquish direct control of the region little by little, but not before they had fo­und dependable monarchs (often imported) in whose hands they could safe­ly place the reins of power. In 1922 they let Egypt go, in 1932 Iraq and Sau­di Arabia, in 1943 Lebanon, in 1946 Jordan and Syria, in 1967 South Yemen, and as recently as 1971, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. This enabled them to sow division between Arabs. In practice, the French and British continued to control most of the Middle East until the end of the Se­cond World War, when the US emerged as the leading power.

One of the conditions of the British mandate from the League of Nations was that a homeland was to be created for the Jews. Despite this and the Balfour Declaration the British government did little to honour this pledge. As early as 1921, Winston Churchill, then minister for colonial affairs, issu­ed a White Book which declared that Jews would never be allowed political supremacy in Palestine (nor Arabs, either, for that matter).

United struggle

Arab and Jewish leaders had conflicting national interests, yet Arab and Je­wish workers often joined together in their struggle to win better terms from the colonial administration and private employers. One example is the conflict at the Nesher quarry and cement factory in the mid-1920s. When the factory was being built in 1924-25, Jews working there were paid 20 pia­stras an hour and worked an eight-hour day. The 80 Egyptians employed at the site were paid only 10 piastras an hour and had to work for nine or ten hours a day. When the Jewish workers went on strike, demanding 25 pia­stras an hour, recognition of their trade union and other improvements, they asked for and received the support of the Egyptian workers. After a two-month strike, most of the Jewish workers’ demands were met, but the Jewish owner fired the Egyptians. The Jewish workers then voted 170 to 30 to stay out until the Egyptians had been reinstated.

However, the Jewish trade union confederation Histadrut (which denied Arabs full membership until 1959) pressured the Jewish workers into re­turning to work. The Egyptians were sent back to Egypt. Jewish leaders were not the only ones to oppose all forms of joint struggle. The Arab le­adership was equally anxious. Nonetheless, in the decades up until the par­tition of Palestine, joint actions were also staged by Jewish and Arab bake­ry workers, railway workers, bus and taxi drivers, dock workers, oil workers and others.4

In the 1920s, Communist parties often played a crucial part in bringing Jews and Arabs together. Leopold Trepper, himself a Jew, and later to become a Soviet master spy in Hitler’s Germany, describes how in his memoirs.5 The party, originally dominated by Jews, founded an organisation called Unity (Ichud in Hebrew, Itachat in Arabic). Its programme was very simple.

> Fight to open up Histadrut (the Israeli trade union confederation) to

Arab workers and create an international trade union.

> Create opportunities for contact between Jews and Arabs, especially b

means of cultural events.

Unity was an immediate success. Towards the end of 1925, it had branches in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv and in farming villages where Arab and Je­wish labourers worked side by side. The branches multiplied in number. In late 1926, the movement held its first national conference, attended by over a hundred delegates, of which forty were Arabs. The influence that the mo­vement began to exert on the kibbutz’s worried the Histadrut leaders, who failed to understand how Jews and Arabs could wage a joint struggle.

Unity was persecuted by the British occupying power, and opposed by Zio­nist organisations and reactionary Arabs. Trepper himself was constantly in and out of prison. But it was Stalin, not domestic repression, that destroy­ed the movement. Everywhere, Stalinist bureaucrats were replacing Ma­rxist internationalism with their own narrow nationalist policies. The Co­mintern (the Communist International) adopted a resolution in 1928 cal­ling for the “Arabisation” of the Palestine Communist Party. This was in line with the theory of “socialism in one country”, which meant that each nation was to pursue its own struggle. Accordingly, Stalin dissolved the Co­mintern in 1943.

More British deception

In 1936, Arab opposition to the British occupation escalated, resulting in what has been described as the first Intifada. In April, a general strike deve­loped into a full-scale uprising. The Arab leadership just managed to bring the movement under control. In October the strike ended. The British go­vernment responded with brutal repression. Among its tactics was one that has become highly popular with the present Israeli government – the de­molition of Arab housing.

The British government then set up the Peel Commission to determine how to gain control of the situation in Palestine. In 1937, the commission proposed dividing the country into a Jewish part (involving the forced re­settlement of a quarter of a million Arabs), an Arab part, and an area that the British would continue to rule themselves. The Arabs refused to accept the Peel plan, and local uprisings continued until 1939.

In that year, the British government changed its mind once again about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In another White Book, it offered Pa­lestine the prospect of independence in ten years time. This was partly due to the mass struggle of the Arab people, but also because Britain once aga­in wanted the support of the Arabs in the fight against Hitler. Jewish sup­port in the war was taken for granted.

The British declared that they would retain power in Palestine until such time as the Arabs were ‘ripe’ for independence. The 1939 White Book was incompatible with the mandate issued to the British by the League of Na­tions, and was denounced by the League’s Permanent Mandates Commis­sion. But the big powers were now preparing to settle their differences with war, and the League of Nations had become an anachronism.

During the Second World War the British government stopped Jewish emi­gration to Palestine, sometimes with catastrophic results. The Struma, a scarcely seaworthy ship, overcrowded with approximately 790 Rumanian Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution, arrived in Istanbul in December 1941. The Turkish authorities did not allow the refugees ashore and asked the Bri­tish if the ship could be allowed to sail to Palestine. Churchill’s government refused. The pro-German authorities in Bulgaria would not let the ship re­turn to their country. A two-month stalemate was ended when the Turkish authorities towed the ship out to sea without a proper engine, a sail or an anchor. After a night adrift on the open sea, the Struma sank, following an explosion. A Soviet submarine may have torpedoed the ship by mistake. Only one person survived. 6

An upswing for Zionism

Despite such tactics, the British imperialists failed in their bid to stop the flow of Jews to Palestine. During the Great Depression of the 1930s the US imposed tougher restrictions to halt the flow of immigrants, and with the German Nazis trying to annihilate the Jewish people altogether, many Jews considered resettlement in Palestine the only safe alternative.

Some Zionists organised themselves into guerrilla groups such as Irgun and Stern, and in pursuit of a Jewish state launched a violent campaign against both the British and the Arabs. Under Menachim Begin, who later beca­me prime minister, Irgun was responsible for the bombing of the King Da­vid Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British military HQ was located. Some 90 people died. Nor did Irgun and Stern hesitate to use terror tactics aga­inst the Arab population. In November 1947, they began driving Arabs out of towns where the population was mainly Jewish. Five months later, Irgun terrorists entered the village of Deir Yassin west of Jerusalem and slaugh­tered at least 150 people, mostly women and children. The Stern group was responsible for the murder of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN’s emissary in the region. One of the Stern leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, who later succeeded Begin as Israeli premier.

Many Jews in Palestine were against both the practices and the aims of the two gangs. The leftist Zionist organisation Hashomer Hatza’ir (and a number of liberal Zionists) wanted to establish an independent secular Palestine.

More workers unity

After the Second World War, people revolted throughout the world against tyranny and colonialism. In Palestine, too, the struggle exploded. In April 1946, a major strike was launched in Palestine that developed into the lar­gest manifestation of solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers ever seen in the country.

Jewish and Arab postal, telephone and telegraph workers initiated the stri­ke and rapidly extracted far-reaching concessions. However, against the re­commendations of the union leadership they overwhelmingly turned the offer down. Then Jewish and Arab railway workers also came out on strike. A united struggle of all railway and postal workers was unprecedented, even middle and lower level white-collar government employees took part in the strike. Less than a week after the first postal workers had come out, around 23 000 government employees were on strike. Tens of thousands of wor­kers employed at British military bases, along with the petroleum workers in and near Haifa, considered joining the strike.7

This could have been the final nail in the coffin of the colonial administra­tion. However, the movement was quashed through the joint efforts of the Histradut leadership, right-wing Zionists, Arab nationalists, and PAWS’ (Pa­lestinian Arab Workers Society) conservative wing. Consciously or uncon­sciously, their actions paved the way for the bloody partitioning of Palesti­ne. Immediately after the strike ended, there was an upsurge in violence be­tween Arabs and Jews.

Independence and Israel becomes the US’ most trusted ally in the Middle East

To escape the mess they had created, the British raised the Palestine qu­estion in the newly-formed United Nations. The UN’s Special Committee for Palestine voted 33 to 13 in favour of splitting Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab part. Ten countries abstained from voting, among them Britain. In practice, therefore, Israel was created against Britain’s will. On 14 May 1948, the state of Israel officially came into being.

Encouraged and armed by the British, Arab states around Israel launched a war against the embryonic Jewish state. The Jordanian army was equip­ped and trained by the British and was led by a British officer, John Bagot Glubb. British Royal Air Force planes took part in the war. On 7 January 1949, the Israelis shot down four RAF planes.8 The British refused to com­ply with UN recommendations and open the country’s ports to Jews. They maintained their blockade of the Mediterranean to prevent reinforcements from reaching Israel.

Initially, the American administration also backed British policy in the re­gion. The Americans imposed an arms embargo on the new Jewish state and maintained it throughout the early stages of the war between Israel and the Arab states. Saudi Arabia was the United States’ largest and most impor­tant ally in the Middle East. That was where the oil was, then as now. The Americans had strongly backed the al-Saud family when it seized power in Saudi Arabia and proclaimed independence in 1932.

The American elite, however, were split on the issue. Some sympathised with the Israelis, and they were backed by others who viewed support for the Jewish state as a way of reducing Britain’s influence in the Middle East and thereby strengthening America’s position in the region. When a truce was declared, the US lifted its embargo.

Despite British military assistance, the Arab states were soundly defeated in the war. Israel seized more territories than had been allotted to it in the 1947 UN resolution to divide Palestine. By way of revenge, Jews who had long been living in Arab countries were brutally driven out. Arab Jews be­came an underclass in Israel.

For many years it was claimed that the Soviet Union supported the Palesti­nian cause from the outset, but this is not true. The Soviet Union voted for the creation of the state of Israel. After the Second World War, the Stalinist regime found itself at odds with its former ‘allies’ and cast around for sup­port elsewhere. As Britain was against the establishment of Israel, the Sta­linist bureaucrats saw the creation of the Jewish state as a blow to British aspirations in the region. Accordingly, they sent weapons to Jews in Palesti­ne via Czechoslovakia.

Later, the roles were reversed. In the 1950s, Egypt seemed to be planning to abolish capitalism. When Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Bri­tain, France and Israel invaded Egypt. The Soviet Union supported Egypt against Israel.

The Americans were totally against the invasion of Egypt, as it risked dama­ging their oil dealings in the region. President Eisenhower threatened a boy­cott unless Israel withdrew its troops from Sinai. In the end Israel complied.

However, in the 60s the US shifted its stance more firmly in favour of Isra­el. In Syria, capitalism and feudalism were abolished following a military coup in 1963. Iraq also began to shift towards the Soviet sphere. Saudi Ara­bia was a highly unstable, despotic state in which slavery was not formal­ly abolished until the 1960s. Revolution threatened the whole region. The US concluded that Israel was the state that would be its most reliable ally in the Middle East.

Israel was granted special privileges. The US providing it with the largest per capita amount of aid for civilian purposes ever granted to any coun­try. Israel has received seventeen times as much money per head of popu­lation as other countries received under the Marshall Plan for post-war re­construction in Europe. In addition, Jews outside Israel donate huge amo­unts to the Israeli economy every year.

In contrast to most poor countries, Israel has been permitted substantial trade restrictions on imports. At the same time, it has benefited from favo­urable export terms, particularly for exports to the US, which was its princi­pal trading partner for many years. In contrast to most poor countries, Isra­el could therefore develop into an industrialized country.

Palestinian resistance begins

The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) was founded in 1964 at the initiative of Egypt’s President Nasser. It is an umbrella body for a wide ran­ge of organisations. The largest of these is al-Fatah, which has links to the Socialist International. Some of the other groups used to call themselves Marxist. The PLO has never had a cohesive ideology, apart from its earlier objective of crushing the state of Israel. Prior to 1967, the PLO had little support among Palestinians. It was not until after the Six-Day War in 1967, when many Palestinians came under Israeli occupation, that the PLO ga­ined mass support.

The PLO began its struggle with a guerrilla war, inspired by Vietnam and Cuba. Their base were the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon that grew up when many Arabs were driven out of Israel in 1948 and 1967. But the si­tuation differed considerably from Vietnam or pre-revolutionary Cuba. The PLO attacked a state that enjoyed the support of most of the population. There were no mountains or jungles for the guerrillas to hide in. Only open ground lay between the refugee camps and the guerrillas’ targets in Israel. Guerrilla war had no chance of succeeding.

The PLO’s reliance on guerrilla warfare, and later diplomacy, also made it eco­nomically and militarily dependent on the Soviet Union and reactionary Arab states. All the dictatorial Arab governments in the countries surrounding Isra­el treated the Palestinians badly seeing them merely as a means of diverting the struggle against their own regimes into a struggle against Israel.

The PLO soon fell out with the Jordanian king. He found the presence of another armed force in his territory unacceptable. It represented a threat to his despotic rule. In September 1970, “Black September”, he launched his armed attack against the PLO. Many Palestinians died, all were disarmed, and the PLO was thrown out of Jordan.

The PLO headquarters ended up in Tunis. Driven out of Jordan, defeated by Israel in Lebanon, isolated from the Palestinian people, their leader Yas­ser Arafat survived on handouts.

The Intifada

This was not the end of the struggle. On the contrary, it was the beginning of the real struggle. In December 1987, the Intifada began. The PLO’s ter­rorist activities had caused most Palestinians to become passive. Why do anything when there were heroes doing things for you? It was enough to cheer them on. But once the PLO was defeated the majority of Palestinians began to take control over their own fate.

The Palestinians were spurred to action by the terrible situation they fo­und themselves in (and still find themselves in). All Palestinians in the occu­pied territories, apart from a small middle-class, lived in abject poverty. Mil­lions were stuck in giant refugee camps. Those who did not live in the refu­gee camps were not much better off, usually occupying tumbledown houses with no sanitation. Unemployment was very high and poverty appalling.

On top of all this, the Palestinians had no legal rights whatsoever and were brutally repressed by the Israeli army. They had to put up with confiscation of their land, the destruction of homes belonging to the families of suspec­ted terrorists, arrests without trial for up to twelve months (and subject to extension), and curfews of up to 40 days’ duration.

It was the Palestinians themselves who financed the oppression. Two and a half times more was sucked out of the occupied areas in the form of ta­xes than was returned in the form of public investments. The tax authori­ties collected tax under military escort.

The Intifada was very different from the guerrilla warfare that had prece­ded it. It mainly took the form of large demonstrations and throwing sto­nes at Israeli soldiers. Between 1968 and 1975 there was an average of 350 ‘violent incidents’ a year in Israel/Palestine. During the first six months of the Intifada, there were 42 355 such incidents. The Intifada was an uprising that involved the entire population and was organised from the bottom up, without any interference from the PLO. Neighbourhood committees were set up to organise the protests and began to develop along democratic lines. Women were brought into the struggle. When the Palestinian economy col­lapsed under pressure from the Israelis, the neighbourhood committees be­gan organising community services such as food supply, education and he­althcare. It was the start of a revolutionary movement.

Israel responded by raising the level of oppression. In 1988, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was later awarded the Nobel peace prize) ordered Isra­eli troops to “break demonstrators’ bones”.9 Amnesty International repor­ted that medical staff in prisons often found themselves “in conflict with medical ethics”.10 Torture was even sanctioned under Israeli law, which is unique for a supposedly democratic country. Since 1987, Israelis are allo­wed to exert “physical and psychological pressure against Palestinian deta­inees”.11

The Israeli violence failed to deter the Palestinians. Instead, it strengthened their resolve, and cemented a Palestinian national consciousness. Previously Arabs living in Palestine had seen themselves more as a part of the Arab nation than as specifically Palestinians.

The Intifada created major problems for the Israeli regime. For the first time since the partition of Palestine after the Second World War, Palestinian protests found a big response among Jews. Three years (for men) or two years (for women) of military service in the occupied territories – during which the soldiers were exposed to the hatred of the entire population, stone-throwing young Palestinians, and having to regularly beat and shoot civilians – took its toll. During and after the Intifada, tens of thousands of Israelis left the country on completion of their military service to try and find peace of mind in countries such as Thailand, Japan and the US.

The Israeli peace movement experienced an upswing and organised mass demonstrations that drew crowds of between 50 000 and 100 000, in a country of little more than four million people. Senior military officers also expressed strong doubts about the possibility of a military solution to the conflicts on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. They saw how the whole army was being demoralised.

The ground was prepared for the two movements to link up. But it never happened. Because on what program should they have fused? Dividing the area into a Palestinian state and a Jewish state? Or creating a secular state in which Palestinians and Jews have equal rights? Neither were, or are, a realistic alternative.

Two states?

As a result of the Intifada an agreement was reached in 1993 providing for a transitional period of Palestinian self-rule on the West Bank and Gaza. This was an extremely limited form of autonomy, and there has been no transition to independence. In fact, since then the possibility of achieving Palestinian independence has receded. Israel did initially agree to provide a certain amount of weapons to a Palestinian police force in the autonomous areas, as long as the police was controlled by people that had allied themselves with Israel. However, they will never be prepared to accept the presence of anything that could be a threat. Consequently, the Israeli army intervenes time and again in Palestine.

Nor does Palestine stand a chance economically. There is scarcely a Palestinian economy worth speaking of. About a third comes from foreign sources (foreign aid, Palestinian guest workers in other countries, etc) and a third from exports to Israel. Palestine is an economic dwarf compared with Israel. Israel has a population almost twice the size of Palestine and a GDP almost forty times as large.12

To get their economy moving, the Palestinians need help. The US is not going to provide it, and nor are the other rich countries. Olive oil is not as attractive as crude oil. Also, capitalism is currently undergoing a phase of economic decline, mass unemployment and crisis in the rich countries as well. In the absence of economic progress, poverty will continue and with it popular revolt. And further Israeli interventions.

Then there is the crucial problem of water. Many of Israel’s freshwater re­serves are in Palestinian territory. Of the West Bank’s water, 86% goes to Israel, ten per cent to the Jewish settlers and just four per cent to the Pale­stinians. The water is already beginning to dry up. As a result, saltwater is entering the wells. On the West Bank, Palestinians are having to buy 70% of their water from the Israelis, at a high price. In the Gaza Strip, a million Palestinians have to share 55 million cubic meters of water while 7 000 Je­wish settlers have 20 million cubic metres at their disposal.13Israel would ne­ver accept an independent Palestinian state taking control over the water in Palestinian territories.

There is also the problem of the many Palestinian refugees. Jews are auto­matically entitled to settle in Israel, but Israel has always refused Palestinians the same right. The UN refugee organisation UNRWA has more than three and a half million Palestinian refugees on its books. A third of them are in UNRWA camps.14 Israel is not going to accept them coming to live in an independent Palestinian state as this would mean that Palestine had a larger population than Israel.

Finally, there are 1.4 million Palestinians living in Israel itself. On what side of the border should they live if two truly independent states were establi­shed? During the latest uprising many Palestinian Israelis begun to take a more active part in the protests. Not surprisingly, the Israeli government views Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship with suspicion. Many have lost their jobs and been denied access to higher education.

A Palestinian state would give the Israeli government an excuse and an op­portunity to throw them out. In all probability, the two-state solution would lead to a bloody wave of ethnic cleansing.

Secular state?

The PLO’s earlier call for a secular state with equal rights for Jews and Pa­lestinians is also doomed to failure. It is no surprise that the PLO has now abandoned the idea. Israel is even less likely to accept a state in which Jews are in a minority than to agree to a separate Palestinian state with a popula­tion larger than Israel’s own. Also, the Israelis had good reason to view the PLO’s ‘secular state’ with suspicion. A closer look at the proposal shows that it would mean a majority of the Jews being thrown out of Palestine.

The PLO Covenant from 1969 states: “The Palestinians are those Arab na­tionals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether inside Palestine or outside it – is also a Pa­lestinian”. But in Article 6, it states: “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Pa­lestinians”. This means that the millions who arrived after 1947 could not become Palestinian citizens. Where would they go? And how would they be ‘convinced’ that they have to leave Palestine?

Jews and Palestinians cannot be brought together in a secular state unless the fundamental social and economic problems of the area are solved. Ten­sions are too great. That is why virtually everyone is seeking a way out by dividing the country. But a genuine two-state solution could cause a major disaster. There is no ‘practical’ solution to the problem – within the frame­work of the capitalist system.

The solution is a set-up that may appear ‘abstract’ or ‘theoretical’ today. The only kind of unity that is possible in the Middle East is working class unity across all national, ethnic and religious boundaries. Only the working clas­ses share a common interest. Beneath all the prejudice, disappointment and fear, this truth remains. Suspicion and hatred can be overcome through jo­int struggle against a common enemy and for a socialist future. There is no alternative if the goal is peace and prosperity. All tyrannical regimes in the region must be overthrown. Only the working class has the strength to ac­complish this, and its strength has grown in the half-century that has passed since the state of Israel came into being. Today, the majority of Jews and Palestinians in the region are no longer peasants and farmers but workers.

Marxists in the 1920s, convinced of the need for a joint struggle for so­cialism, found ways of uniting Jews and Arabs. They simply followed the example of the Russian Bolsheviks. Before 1917, Russia was a country wracked by anti-Jewish pogroms. But in October of that year the Russian working class massively supported the Bolsheviks, half of whose central committee members were of Jewish origin.

If the workers used their strength to establish a socialist federation thro­ughout the Middle East, with self-determination for all national and ethnic groups, the region’s economic problems could be solved. Turkey uses only a small part of its water reserves. In pursuit of a better society for all, pe­ople could share Turkey’s water, Israel’s technological expertise, the sheiks’ riches, the oil, and all the money that would otherwise be wasted on we­apons. The problem is not a lack of resources but who owns them and how they are used. A region torn apart by imperialism has to be reunited.

_____________________________

1 From Great Britain. Parliamentary Papers, 1939, Misc. No. 3

2 Ronald Stockton: Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1993

3 Justin McCarthy: Population of Palestine, 1990

4 Yossi Schwarz: Arab-Jewish Workers’ Joint Struggles Prior to the Partition of Palestine, June 2003.

See www.marxist.com/MiddleEast/arab_jewish_struggles1.html

5 The Great Game, 1975

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struma

7 www.marxist.com/MiddleEast/arab_jewish_struggles2.html

8 Mitchell Bard: The war of 1948, 2003

9 www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/rabin/profile/

10 Amnesty International Country Report: Under Constant Medical Supervision, 1996

11 ibid

12 CIA World Fact Book

13 Evert Svensson: Vägen till Palestina, tvĺ folk och ett stycke jord, 2002

14 www.shaml.org/resources/facts/palestinian_refugees_fact_sheet.htm

Why not do it the Gandhi way? He defeated the British Empire and

he had no weapons!

Michael Moore in ‘Bowling for Columbine’

After the Second World War, Britain was forced to cede independence to many colonies, including India. However, contrary to how Indian independence is usually presented it was not a peaceful affair inspired by Gandhi’s ideas of non-violent resistance. If it really had been Gandhi and his methods that had defeated the British Empire, there would be an alter­native to the working class’s collective and democratically organised strug­gle for peace. But Gandhi gave India neither independence nor peace.

Earning one’s rights

Gandhi first became involved in politics in South Africa and it was there his ideas evolved. He had studied in Britain, but after taking his law degree had found it difficult to get employment in India. Therefore he took a job as a representative of wealthy Indians living under British rule in Natal.1 In South Africa, Gandhi saw that Indians were treated as second class citizens, even if they had money. The turning point in his life came when he was ejected from a first-class train carriage because of his ethnic origin.

Gandhi saw the injustice around him, but his response was to try and make the Indians good members of the Empire. In his view, this was the way to show that they deserved to be treated as equals. They were to conduct themselves properly, observe cleanliness, and learn good English. When the Boer War (1899-1901) broke out between the British colonial forces and the Dutch settlers, the Boers, Gandhi urged the Indians to support the British.2 Gandhi himself organised an ambulance brigade and volunteered as a medical orderly together with more than a thousand other Indians. He later wrote: “I felt that, if I demanded rights as a British citizen, it was also my duty, as such, to participate in the defence of the British Empire”.3

Gandhi adopted the same approach in response to the Zulu uprising of 1906, when the Zulus revolted against the colonial regime’s taxation of their huts. The tax was a way of forcing the Africans to work for the British for cash. The rebels were surrounded and 500 of them were mown down by machine-gun fire. Crops and homes were burnt for good measure.4 De­scribing the event, Gandhi would write: “This was not war, but a manhunt.” Although he and his fleet of ambulance workers also treated wounded Zu­lus, they remained faithful to the government side. Gandhi himself was temporarily awarded the rank of staff sergeant and given a uniform by the government to encourage the recruitment of more Indians as ambulance workers. The Indian volunteers later received medals for their efforts – but no civil rights. On the contrary, laws were introduced in Transvaal the fol­lowing year under which all Indians had to register with the authorities, supply fingerprints and carry passports with them at all times. Those who refused were no longer entitled to live in Transvaal.

Non-violence as a method

After having been deceived by the regime on a number of occasions, Gan­dhi realised that displays of loyalty would not bring about change. Instead, he began organising the burning of passports and other forms of civil disobedience. Indian businessmen traded without a licence, and Indians crossed the border into Transvaal without permission. It was during this period that the satyagraha (‘truth-force’) method, or passive resistance, began to be used systematically. Gandhi’s basic tenet was that one should not subject ones opponents to violence or hatred. His followers should set an example and confront brutality without hitting back, and in that way eventually persuade their opponents that they were in the wrong and cause them to change. The idea was ”the vindication of truth not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but on one’s self”.5 Gandhi also described this approach in the following terms: “The real road to ultimate happiness lies in going to jail and undergoing suffering there in the interest of one’s own country and religion”.6 Over a number of years, he and his supporters were jailed time and again, and hundreds were deported to India. But no laws were changed.

In 1913, the South African leader, General Smuts, once again reneged on his promises.7 He had pledged, for instance, to abolish a special tax imposed on Indian contract workers at the end of their term of labour. In practice, this tax forced them to either sign a new contract or leave the country. In addition, a judge ruled that only Christian marriages were to be considered legal, which meant Indian wives were officially regarded as mistresses without rights.

However, the same year, the struggle took a completely new turn. Indian miners came out on strike in protest at the hated tax on contract workers. Suddenly, the protests were no longer a matter of Indians (mainly busi­nessmen) violating the passport laws here and there and being jailed. Coal production in Newcastle was brought to a halt.

The mine-owners turned off both the electricity and the water supply to the workers’ barracks. For a socialist, the obvious thing to do in such cir­cumstances would have been to provide and mobilise financial support to ensure that the strike spread and grew stronger, and to try and establish unions in the mines.

But such an approach was alien to Gandhi, and according to his autobi­ography his friends from the trader class were not prepared to help. They had business relations with the mine owners. So, instead, Gandhi told the workers to sell their household goods and join him on a pilgrim’s march to Johannesburg. Their destination was Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi and his supporters lived. The mineworkers’ wives and children went along as well, and the march amassed 2 000 people in all. (Gandhi sometimes refers to 4 000 – 5000 people, which suggests that others joined along the way).

Gandhi did not intend them reaching the farm. He wanted to “see them safely deposited in jail.” He even wrote to the government asking it to be “kind enough to arrest us where we stood.” His plan was to turn the work­ers’ mass struggle into an act of civil disobedience: to cross a border, go to jail and then see if the government lost heart. 8

After a 13-day march, when the workers had almost reached Tolstoy Farm, the authorities struck. Troops rounded up the strikers and marched them to special trains commandeered to take them back to Newcastle. Gandhi was already in jail, but he had previously instructed the workers to accept whatever befell them without resistance. He had transferred the leadership of the movement to one of his friends, Polak.

The workers, however, were not totally amenable. They demanded that Gan­dhi be summoned to the railway station and agree in person to their being arrested by the government. Gandhi did not like the idea. The workers were told that imprisonment was their goal and that they should appreciate the government’s action. The workers climbed aboard the trains. They were im­mediately taken back to the mines, which had now been enclosed by barbed wire and turned into prisons. The mine-owners’ European staff had been appointed prison guards and they ordered the workers to return to work. When the strikers refused, they were whipped and kicked. The march and its brutal conclusion cost a number of lives, including those of two babies.9

Gandhi wanted to call off the workers’ struggle at this point. But against his will, and despite mounted police opening fire on the mineworkers, the strike spread to Indian workers on the sugar plantations, on the railways, in factories and in offices. Gandhi wrote afterwards: “I had warned my co-workers against allowing any more labourers to go on strike…But when the floodgates are opened, there is no checking the universal deluge. The labourers everywhere struck work of their own accord, and volunteers also posted themselves in various places to look after them.”10

After the “Great March” of 1913, General Smuts appointed a commission to review the position of the Indian community in South Africa. Gandhi argued that the Indians themselves should be allowed at least one repre­sentative on the commission. When Smuts refused, Gandhi prepared to go to jail once again and urged a group of Indians to begin a protest march on Durban. But the march never came about. Gandhi explains why in his memoirs: ”Just at this time there was a great strike of European employees of the Union railways, which made the position of Government extremely delicate…But I declared that the Indians could not assist the railway strikers, as they were not out to harass the government, their struggle being entirely different and differently conceived.”11

Instead of trying to establish ties with the striking white workers, Gandhi once again took the government’s side. Smuts had no qualms about using force against the white workers. He declared a state of emergency in a bid to smash the strike. When the railwaymen’s union, the Transvaal Federa­tion of Trades, responded by calling a general strike, Smuts brought in an army, arrested nine union leaders and deported them to Britain.12 Gandhi’s strategy made things difficult not only for the black population, but also for white workers engaged in active struggle. Gandhi later notes that “British friends in South Africa” applauded his decision and Lord Ampthill had sent him a telegram wishing him luck.

Victory

In the end, the government backed down and a short time later passed the Indian Relief Act.13 Under this law, the ‘three-pound tax’ was abolished, Indian marriages became legal, the immigration laws were eased and those who had taken part in the conflict were pardoned. It was a remarkable vic­tory that gave hope and inspiration to many people labouring under the colonial yoke far beyond the borders of South Africa. But why did the government concede defeat?

Gandhi himself suggests that it was the ‘chivalry’ of the Indians towards the government and his own correspondence with General Smuts that were the decisive factors.14 He also notes that the violence aroused such wide­spread indignation in India that Lord Harding, the British Viceroy, spoke out against the South African government and its laws.

A more obvious explanation for the retreat of the South African govern­ment is that it was severely shaken by the Indian and white strikes, which had come at a time when the blacks, too, had begun to organise nationally, across tribal boundaries. The ANC (African National Congress) was found­ed in 1912, and in 1913 black women in the Orange Free State launched protests against the rule whereby they had to pay for their passports every month. In June 1913, both white and black miners went on strike. When 13 000 African workers downed tools, the strike leaders were jailed and troops were brought in to force the strikers back to work.15 When Gandhi met General Smuts after the Great March, he observed that the South African leader was extremely troubled by the strikes, and more docile than ever. Smuts himself declared that the government needed a breathing space, and Gandhi was happy to grant it one.

The survival of the South African regime, which guaranteed white privi­lege, was contingent on its ability to divide the working class along racial lines. The troubles that broke out in 1913 posed a threat to the entire struc­ture. If the workers’ struggle had been linked across colour lines, things would have turned out very differently. Even the white union, the Transvaal Federation of Trades, acted in solidarity with the striking Indian workers in 1913 – despite the fact that it officially sanctioned segregation between whites and blacks. The union issued a statement expressing “sympathy for the Asians in their struggle” and demanded that “no white man should act as a strike-breaker”.16

The protest actions organised by Gandhi’s movement might have encour­aged the blacks in their struggle, but the fact that Gandhi refused to coop­erate with white, black or coloured workers helped the government. The regime took the opportunity to cement a split in the working class by grant­ing certain rights to Indians alone.17 At the same time, things were made considerably more difficult for the blacks. A law was passed under which the white minority – about a fifth of the population – was to control over 90% of all land.18 The Native Land Act decreed that the black population could not own land outside special reserves. Blacks were thrown out of their homes and deprived of their livelihoods. They then had no choice but to register as labourers in mines, industries and plantations. A somewhat higher status for Indians had been achieved at the expense of the majority of the population.

The First World War

In 1914, Gandhi called off the satyagraha campaign and left South Africa. He travelled first to Britain, where he arrived two days after the outbreak of the First World War. Once again, he demonstrated his loyalty to the Brit­ish colonial power. When Indians argued that this was the right moment to fight for their rights, Gandhi protested: “I thought that England’s need should not be turned into our opportunity, and that it was more becoming and far-sighted not to press our demands while the war lasted.”19 Instead, he urged Indians living in Britain to join the war effort! He felt it was com­pletely wrong to refuse to serve out of “anger and ill-will” or “ignorance and weakness”.

For the third time, he began to organise an ambulance brigade, but he also urged those who did not believe in ahimsa (non-violence) to take up arms to help Britain. He wrote to Lord Crewe to inform him that he and his com­patriots were at the service of the Empire.

Many of Gandhi’s supporters found this difficult to swallow. When asked later to explain his stance, he offered different explanations at different times. In 1920, he wrote: “When the choice is between cowardice and violence, I would strongly recommend violence”.20 In 1925, he wrote: “By enlisting men for ambulance work in South Africa and in England, and recruits for field service in India, I helped not the cause of war, but I helped the institution called the British Empire in whose ultimate beneficial character I then believed (…) life is not a single line; it is a bundle of duties very often conflicting.” In 1928, he stated that one of the motives was to promote the cause of Indian self-rule by serving the Empire’s statesmen. Whichever explanation was closest to the truth, the result was that Gandhi was now asking his supporters to kill and die for the sake of their oppres­sors. Gandhi himself fell ill and returned to India.

Colonialism in India

India was a British colony for 200 years. Colonial India was larger than modern India. In those days, neither Pakistan nor Bangladesh were inde­pendent. The British merchants who first arrived there were drawn by spic­es, sugar, silk and cotton. They traded these commodities for British goods. Via their business dealings, the merchants eventually became involved in local politics and conflicts, and in 1757 a British force defeated a rebellious domestic army for the first time. This marked the beginning of Britain’s empire-building in India.

For India, colonisation meant the suppression of the country’s own eco­nomic development. The British industrial barons did not want competi­tion, so they closed down most of the Indian textile industry as well as other forms of local manufacture. In the 19th century, food was exported to Britain, even when Indians were starving. The main purpose of the in­frastructure built by the British, especially the railways, was to facilitate the plunder of the country’s natural resources.

The British considered themselves naturally superior to the natives, but were nevertheless keen to gain the loyalty of the Indian upper class. The sons of the elite were sent to the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford to absorb the ideology, economics and lifestyles of their masters. This educa­tion had a profound impact. Besides Gandhi, people like Jawaharlal Nehru (later to become India’s first prime minister) and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the future leader of Pakistan) attended these institutions.

There was resistance to British rule in India throughout the colonial period, although it took different forms. Peasant uprisings, strikes and army revolts occurred time and again. The British rulers were obviously anxious to chan­nel these protests into manageable forms. Consequently, a political party, the Indian National Congress, was set up in 1885 by “a worthy British civil servant”, Octavian Hume.21

From the outset, this became the party of the Indian upper class, both Hindus and Muslims. It supported the British in the First World War, and remained silent when young Indians who revolted against colonial rule were sentenced to be hanged. As the Congress Party received substantial economic support from the owners of industry, it condemned a strike by textile workers in Bombay in the 1920s. Gandhi adopted both the party line and the party itself. He declared that no-one should expect him to “under­take a fight that must end in anarchy and red ruin”.22 When the Viceroy, Britain’s chief representative in India, in 1917 sought his support for the war, Gandhi complied. At the outbreak of the First World War, Gandhi had only appealed to Indians living in Britain to enter the war as volunteers on the side of the British Empire. He now urged Indian men at home to do so too. Just as before, he felt that Indians should prove themselves worthy of political rights. Once again, this strategy failed to work. Indians died in Mesopotamia and in the ghastly trenches on the Western Front in Europe, but nothing improved in India. Instead, the emergency powers introduced during the war remained in place once it was over. The Rowlatt Act pro­vided for the arrest and detention without trial of people suspected of anti-government activities.

Not until after the war did Gandhi begin openly resisting the British govern­ment. In April 1917, in protest at the country’s unfair laws, he proclaimed a hartal, i.e. a day of fasting and prayer during which no-one was to work. Shops were to close and workers were to strike. The decision was never discussed in the Congress Party. Gandhi explained later that it had been reached after discussion with “some friends”. The day of protest met with an enthusiastic response. But the police intervened and provoked violence and rioting, and Gandhi called off the action. He condemned those who had fought the police, and as recompense for the protestors having gone too far, he announced that he himself would fast for 74 hours. He urged others to fast for 24 hours. Gandhi later described the protest as a “blunder of Himalayan proportions”. He said he had come to realise that you must show respectful obedience for the laws of the state, if you want to practise civil disobedience. The protestors had failed in this. When he tried to mo­bilise voluntary instructors who were to educate the general public in this aspect of satyagraha, he got no response at all.23

Shortly after Gandhi called off his campaign, British brutality in India reached new heights. In the Sikhs’ holy city of Amritsar, a mass meeting was held on 13 April 1919 attended by thousands of men, women and children. As the meeting was illegal under colonial law, the British commander on the spot, General Dyer, took action. Without warning, he gave his soldiers orders to open fire on the crowd. People were surrounded by buildings and had no means of escape. The shooting continued for ten minutes, leaving 379 people dead on the ground and more than 1 200 wounded.24 (According to a commission set up by the Congress Party, the death toll was 1 000.) The massacre sent shock waves through India. Hatred and fury at colonial rule flared anew. Even Gandhi lost respect for the British system. He returned the war medals he had been awarded in South Africa, and wrote a letter of protest to the Viceroy. But he still hoped to awaken the British conscience, and became an increasingly dedicated advocate of non-violence.

Throughout the 1920s, Gandhi’s movement continued to waver back and forth. To combat poverty in rural areas, Gandhi organised a boycott of im­ported fabrics and burned them in public. But when the protests got out of hand, and a number of police were killed, the campaign was called off.

The Salt March

In 1929, Gandhi organised a march in protest at a British government deci­sion to introduce a tax on salt. He urged people to defy the British and fetch their salt directly from the sea. Mass arrests ensued, and at least a hundred people were killed by the police. The protest against the tax was, of course, justified, but once again unarmed Gandhi followers were exposed to actions that caused loss of life. When 2 500 demonstrators marched on the salt works at Dharasana, they were met by police armed with lathis, heavy staffs with iron bands. The demonstrators walked towards the police lines and wave after wave of them were struck down without resistance. The incident is depicted in Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi, and it is truly sickening to watch. The crack of the staffs against unprotected heads. The men going down like ninepins and being dragged away with fractured skulls. Two men died and 320 were injured.25This episode illustrates Gandhi’s methods.

All who dare oppose brutal oppression must of course expect injury and perhaps even loss of life. Oppression is maintained by violence. But when you decide to enter into battle, surely it is best to do so when you can rea­sonably hope to win? If people who rise up show enough strength and determination, the armed forces of those in power will begin to hesitate, split up and eventually join the struggle themselves. This is also a way of minimising the violence and the injuries inflicted on people.

Gandhi had a different aim. In essence, his method was to let innocent people be injured or killed without offering resistance. Such a strategy, however, meant that the police or soldiers who act on the power holders’ behalf are given no chance to revolt. The police at the Dharasana salt works were also Indians. Clubbing down fellow-countrymen who were protest­ing against injustices that they, too, suffered from was doubtless repulsive to them. Gandhi’s tactic left them with no choice, however. There was no fighting resistance movement for them to join. The police could not even tell their superiors they had been overpowered and had thus been unable to use force against the demonstrators. Refusing to obey orders would have been tantamount to suicide. Consequently, the death of demonstrators was unavoidable.

One-sided

Gandhi’s non-violent approach was strangely one-sided. It afflicted those who turned to Gandhi in the hope that he would lead them in their struggle, and it spared those in power. Gandhi was not even prepared to use violence against Hitler’s monstrous Nazi regime. In 1940, he appealed to the British people in the following terms: “If these gentlemen (Hitler and Mussolini – editor’s note) choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them”.26 Gandhi called this method non-violent non-collaboration.

Violence, then, was not to be used against colonial oppressors or capitalist exploiters. But in the case of soldiers and police, they were not allowed to practice non-violence, at least not without permission, according to Gan­dhi. In 1922, when Hindu soldiers from the Garhwal Rifles bravely refused to open fire against an anti-imperialist demonstration staged by Muslims in Peshawar – Gandhi condemned their behaviour! He explained: “When a soldier refuses to fire then he is guilty of betraying his oath. I can never advise soldiers to defy the orders of officers because, if tomorrow I form a government, I will have to use the same soldiers and officers.”27

Gandhi shows here that he identifies with those who usually give the or­ders, not with those who are expected to obey. He wants to represent all Indians, but when he has to choose sides, he aligns himself with the ruling class. When Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress in South Africa in 1894, it was principally an organisation for well-off Indian merchants. The uneducated contract workers could not afford to pay the membership fee. The fee was three pounds – the same sum as the hated tax that the con­tract workers laboured under.28 During the Great March of 1913, Gandhi showed an open distrust in the workers: “Well-known and intelligent vol­unteers were required to look after these obscure and uneducated men, and were very forthcoming”.29

On another occasion, Gandhi wrote that capitalists are often greedy, “but when labour comes to fully realise its strength I know it can become more tyrannical than capital. The mill-owners will have to work on the terms dictated by labour, if the latter could command intelligence of the former. It is clear, however, that labour will never attain to that intelligence….The capitalists do not fight on the strength of money alone. They do possess intelligence and tact.”30 In 1922, Gandhi warned against political strikes, despite the fact that it was precisely such a strike that first brought him fame in South Africa in 1913.

Gandhi admired British civilisation. He had no wish to defeat the British Empire or its economic system. He mixed freely with representatives of the British ruling class. For example, he joined the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in draw­ing up what was known as the Irwin-Gandhi Pact. Under this agreement, the campaign of civil disobedience was to be terminated in exchange for the British allowing salt to be freely produced in India.

The mass movement

How, then, did India manage to win independence in 1947, and why was the country partitioned?

Films and books about Gandhi seldom mention the fact that other powerful forces were also on the move at this time. One indication of this was the enthusiasm aroused in India by the Russian revolution, and the setting up of a Communist Party, the CPI, in the 1920s. Despite the fact that the party was outlawed most of the time and severely repressed, and also committed a number of errors under the influence of Moscow, it was widely supported. In 1938 it mobilised 50 000 workers in Calcutta in support of a demand for a ‘Workers’ Socialist Republic’. In the same year, more than half a million im­poverished peasants registered to attend a CPI rural conference.31 When the Second World War broke out in 1939, the CPI organised anti-war demon­strations and a one-day protest strike under the slogan: “Long live freedom in India!” Many Communist workers were imprisoned for agitating.

Meanwhile, the Congress Party was becoming polarised, and a number of leftist groups were aligning themselves more closely with the CPI. Among those who called for a more aggressive struggle against the British was Dr Subhas Bose. In 1939, he defeated Gandhi in a vote to decide who was to head the Congress Party. This marked a radicalisation of the movement. It was followed, however, by Stalin’s about-turn and the alliance between Stalin and Churchill. In 1942, the Communists were instructed to cooperate with ‘British democracy’, whereupon the CPI called off its anti-imperialist agitation. This led to conflict and confusion within the ranks, and sowed division in the broad-based left that had just begun to take shape.

The Communist Party leadership was suddenly on good terms with the British rulers. The party was legalised and its leaders released from prison. They now sought to stop strikes, prevent soldiers from deserting and pre­vent young people from demonstrating. For years, the CPI was completely isolated from the mass movement.

Instead, popular power was channelled into the Congress Party. Its leaders took a stronger stand, and in August 1942 Gandhi delivered his ‘Quit India!’ speech, calling on the British to abandon India altogether. A new wave of revolt swept the country. Gandhi and thousands of others were impris­oned. Many were whipped, tortured or hanged for their audacity, while the reputation of the Congress Party grew apace. Gandhi was released after a few months. He was ill, and the Viceroy was afraid that the protests would be even greater if he were to die in jail.

After the war, a new situation developed. The British Empire had been weakened. Powerful leftist currents were making headway in both Europe and the US. In Britain, the Labour Party came to power. And in India, too, the resistance movement found new strength.

The revolution of 1946

1946 was a year of revolution in India.32 First, a mass movement forced the British to release a group of political prisoners. One was a Hindu, one a Sikh and one a Muslim. A mutiny then followed among soldiers and offic­ers of the British army in India, and finally a series of general strikes. The most ambitious of these revolts was an uprising in Bombay by sailors of the British Indian Navy.33

The rebellion began with a strike on 18 February aboard the battleship HMS Talwaar anchored in Bombay harbour. The following day, the strikers contacted naval personnel on land. Together, they took over naval vehicles, hoisted red flags on them and began patrolling the city. They also invited the people of the city to join their struggle. By the evening of the following day, a growing number of naval personnel had joined. The Union Jacks on the Royal Indian Navy ships in the harbour were torn down and replaced by red flags and flags representing the parties fighting for Indian independ­ence. After just two days, news of the revolt had spread far afield, both by word of mouth and via a radio station taken over by the rebels that broad­cast revolutionary songs and poetry round the clock. The revolt eventually spread to 74 ships, 20 fleets and 22 naval units in various places along the coast, including Calcutta, Karachi, Madras and Cochin. Two days after the revolt had begun only ten ships and two naval stations were not in complete revolt. Earlier a strike committee had been formally set up, with a Muslim as president and a Sikh as vice-president. The choice of leaders was designed to avert religious division.

On the third day of revolt, British elite troops opened fire on the sailors in Bombay as they were leaving their barracks. At a stroke, a peaceful uprising was turned into an armed confrontation. Over the next few days, several hundred sailors and workers lost their lives. The factory workers who had joined the sailors’ revolt were also subjected to brutal attacks by the British. To defend their comrades in the cities, sailors of the Narba fleet announced over loudspeakers that they would destroy the British military bases by shelling them if the British troops dared to attack.

The British government was badly shaken. Sir Claude Auchinleck, com­mander-in-chief of the British armed services in India, wrote in a telegram to London that “if you do not promise them independence within three days, they will take it by force”. Prime Minister Clement Atlee (Labour) demanded that the uprising be smashed, while in India itself, Sardar Vallabhbai Patel of the Congress Party immediately came out in support of the British.

Isolated and betrayed by their national leadership, the strike committee saw no alternative but to surrender. They hoisted black flags to signal their defeat. At its final meeting, however, the strike committee had adopted a resolution describing the action: “We, the workers in uniform, shall never forget this. We also know that you, our proletarian brothers and sisters, shall never forget this. The coming generations, learning their lesson, shall accomplish what we have not been able to achieve. Long live the working masses. Long live the revolution.”34

The struggle continued. In Bombay, a general strike paralysed the entire city and barricades were built to prevent the passage of police and troops. Over a three-day period, more than 400 people were killed in street fighting. In March, the police were among those who took part in a wave of strikes that swept through major cities. In May, workers of the North-Western Railway downed tools, and in July more than 100 000 postal workers came out on strike. Industrial workers throughout the Indian subcontinent joined in. In this movement, Hindus and Muslims fought side by side. They revolted together in the army, they built barricades, they organised demonstrations – and they hoisted red flags everywhere.

Bloody partition

The British government knew that the era of direct colonial rule in India was over. How were they to salvage their economic interests and maintain their domination of the country? The answer was not clear. Several ac­counts of Indian history give the impression that it was Muhammad Ali Jin­nah and the Muslim League that were entirely to blame for what followed – the partition of India. But that was not the case.

Over time, a rift that had developed between the Muslim and Hindu elites gradually widened. It was not a religious conflict – neither the Muslim lead­er, Jinnah, nor the Hindu representative Jawaharlal Nehru were particularly religious – but a struggle for power. Back in 1906, the Muslim bourgeoisie had built up a political organisation of their own, the Muslim League, that was to protect their interests against the Hindu majority. At first, this did not prevent leading Muslims from becoming involved with the Congress Party. In the 1930s, however, some elements in the Muslim League began talking about an independent Muslim state. Such a solution would enable Muslims to avoid having to compete for power and markets with the Hin­dus; they would automatically become the ruling clique in a future Pakistan. For a long time, however, these ideas were considered unrealistic. In virtu­ally every village, Hindus and Muslims lived alongside one another. But during the Second World War, the Congress Party and the Muslim League went separate ways. The Muslim League continued to collaborate with the British, and the idea of setting up an independent Pakistan began to be taken seriously, especially by Jinnah.

In May 1946, a British delegation sent to India presented the ‘Cabinet Mission Plan’. Under this plan, India was to remain a single entity, but the central government would only be responsible for defence matters, foreign policy and communications. For the rest, the country would be divided into three zones, of which the Muslims would totally dominate one and have a slight majority in another. The Hindus would totally dominate the third zone. The plan was designed to satisfy the Muslims and reassure them that they would not be neglected as a minority. After three days of discussion, Jinnah and the Muslim League Council agreed to the proposal. Jinnah was not happy with it, but felt it was the best the Muslims could hope for. Ac­cordingly, he withdrew the demand for partition. The Council’s decision was unanimous. Later the plan was also adopted by the Congress Working Party and subsequently by the All-India Congress Committee (AICC).

This, however, was not the end of the story. At about the same time, a power struggle developed in the Congress Party when Maulana Abdul Ka­lam Azad was to step down as president. Jawaharlal Nehru emerged as the victor. Three days after the meeting of the AICC, on 10 July 1947, Nehru held a press conference at which questions were asked as to whether the Congress Party had accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in every detail. Ne­hru’s answer astonished everyone. He stated that the Congress Party would enter the Constituent Assembly “completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise”. The party, he added later, consid­ered itself free to change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best. This statement left the fragile agreement in tatters. For Jinnah, it was a slap in the face. The Congress Party’s stance, he declared, meant that the minorities in India would be left at the mercy of the majority.

The small-mindedness of the elites, both Muslim and Hindu, enabled the new British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to decide that India needed to be divided. It was Mountbatten himself, as the representative of the Empire, who wielded the knife. “Mountbatten as Viceroy was given the difficult task of phasing out the British Empire in India. He performed this task with considerable diplomatic skill, and the Hindu and Muslim leaders accepted partition of the country, albeit reluctantly”.35 It was a classic tactic: divide and rule. Bearing in mind how intimately he and his wife, Lady Edwina, fraternised with Nehru in particular (but also with Gandhi), it seems likely that he had more than one finger in the pie when the Cabinet Mission Plan was toppled.

The result was two new states based on religious affiliation: India (Hinduism) and Pakistan (Islam).36 Not even the future rulers of these new states knew in advance where the borders were to run.

Gandhi was initially against the partition of India. But there was only one way to oppose partition and that was by supporting the workers’ struggle for a socialist India. Given his background, Gandhi could never countenance such a move. He therefore had no choice but to accept the terrible alternative of partition. Congress Party leader Maulana Abul Azad wrote: “When I met Gandhi again, I had the greatest shock of my life to find that he had changed. He was still not openly in favour of Partition but he no longer spoke so vehemently against it. What surprised and shocked me even more was that he began to repeat the arguments which Sardar Patel (a leader of the Congress Party that advocated partition – editors comment) had already used. For over two hours I pleaded with him, but could make no impression on him.”37

The independence and ensuing partition of India brought about the great­est wave of forced resettlement in modern history, some 12-16 million. Around a million people lost their lives. The whole situation changed. People lost hope of a new and better society. Suddenly, millions no longer belonged where they had always lived and worked, simply because they did not share the same religious faith as the majority. Muslims became hos­tages in India and Hindus hostages in Pakistan. This created a tremendous amount of anger and frustration. The relative harmony in which Muslims and Hindus had lived down through the ages was suddenly shattered. The scenes that occurred when different religious groups confronted one an­other were terrible. In Lahore, the gutters ran with blood. People had their hands and feet chopped off or their eyes poked out. One police officer described Lahore as “a city in the throes of committing suicide”. In utter panic, people fled from their homes to railway stations, which became so overcrowded that many were crushed beneath the wheels when the trains rolled in.

Another outcome of partition was that Kashmir – where the population is three quarters Muslims – was split in two and largely came under Indian jurisdiction. Since then, the Kashmir conflict has been a flashpoint in the wars between India and Pakistan in 1948, 1965 and 1971. More than 40 000 people have died in confrontations in the region since 1989. In 1999, the two armies clashed at Kargil in Kashmir, but under strong pressure from Washington the Pakistani forces pulled back. The last time things hotted up was in 2002. More than a million soldiers were mobilised along the border between India and Pakistan, and any kind of incident or skirmish might have triggered all-out war.

The conflict in Kashmir came before the UN Security Council for the first time in 1948, when two resolutions calling for a referendum were adopted. The idea was that the people of Kashmir themselves should decide who they wanted to be ruled by. Over half a century has passed since then, and further resolutions have been adopted, but none of them have been implemented.

The wounds inflicted by partition have yet to heal. Like boils, they burst time and again, unleashing violence and destruction. The ruling classes and the state in India and Pakistan have used the issue to deflect popular discontent in their own countries. Army leaders for their part have used Kashmir as a means of justifying huge military budgets paid for by impov­erished peoples. Both India and Pakistan are military giants today, and both have nuclear weapons. At the end of the 1990s, former CIA chief William Casey described the region as the most dangerous in the world. A nuclear war in the area cannot be ruled out. This is the dead end of Gandhi’s road to peace.

_________________

1 At that time, South Africa was divided into four ‘states’. Cape Province and Natal were

British colonies, while Transvaal and the Orange Free State were controlled by the Boers, i.e. colonial settlers with Dutch roots.

2 The British army triumphed and annexed Transvaal and the Orange Free State as well.

3 Mohandas Gandhi: Gandhi’s Autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth

4 Ernst Harsh: Sydafrika, vit makt svart revolt, 1985

5 Michael Nicholson: Mahatma Gandhi, 1987

6 ibid.

7 The South African Union had been established in 1910, uniting the four states and turn

ing them into provinces.

8 Mohandas Gandhi: Satyagraha in South Africa, Second Edition 1950

9 K. Chetty: Gandhi – Mahatma in the making 1893-1914, 1996

10 Mohandas Gandhi: Satyagraha in South Africa

11 ibid

12 A. Lerumo: Fifty Fighting Years, The South African Communist Party 1921-1971, 1987

13 Act No. 22 of 1914

14 Mohandas Gandhi: Satyagraha in South Africa, 1950

15 Ernst Harsh: Sydafrika, vit makt svart revolt, 1985

16 A. Lerumo: Fifty Fighting Years, 1987, p.28

17 Ernst Harsh: Sydafrika, vit makt svart revolt, 1985. Later, when the apartheid system was

fully in place, the Indians became a racial category in their own right, midway between the whites and the blacks. The Indians and the coloureds had slightly more extensive rights than the blacks. They did not have to carry passports, they could find better jobs and they were allowed to engage in certain kinds of business activities.

18 Ernst Harsh: Sydafrika, vit makt svart revolt, 1985. The blacks were originally allocated

7.3% of the land surface. This was later raised to just over 13%.

19 Mohandas Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1948

20 Mohandas Gandhi: For Pacifists, 1981

21 Lal Khan: Partition, Can It Be Undone? 2nd edition, 2003

22 ibid.

23 Mohandas Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

24 Michael Nicholson: Mahatma Gandhi, 1987

25 ibid

26 Ed. Homer Jackson: The Ghandi Reader, 1956

27 Lal Khan: Partition – Can it be undone? 2nd edition, 2003

28 K Chetty: Gandhi – Mahatma in the making 1893-1914, 1996 (http://scnc.udw.ac.za/doc/

TEXTS/kc/kctext.html)

29 Mohandas Gandhi: Satyagraha in South Africa, 1950

30 Ed. Homer Jackson: The Ghandi Reader, 1956

31 Lal Khan: Partition, Can it be Undone? 2nd edition, 2003

32 Missionary E. Stanley Jones, too, notes that “India in 1946 was ripe for revolution”.

Mahatma Gandhi, 1948

33 Lal Khan: Partition, Can it be Undone? 2nd edition, 2003

We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face.

John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, 1953-19591

I am Fidel Castro and we have come to liberate Cuba.

Fidel Castro on meeting the first peasant after landing with Granma on Cuba in 19562

After the Second World War, a new global situation developed. Germany and Japan lay in ruins. France and Britain had been on the decline as great powers for some time. Although they were formally speaking on the winning side, they emerged severely weakened. For the US, things were dif­ferent. American factories and infrastructure were intact and running at full speed. The US government was able to dictate the terms for world trade, and the dollar was the global currency. In 1950, the US alone accounted for 40% of global GDP (Gross Domestic Product).3 Finally, after two world wars, a depression and numerous minor wars, the imperialist system had arrived at a relatively stable global division of power. However, this did not mean the end of wars. Just new types of wars and new struggles against war.

With the US so dominant after the Second World War, trade barriers that did not suit them were steadily dismantled and world trade became the en­gine that hauled capitalism into a new expansive age. Due to working-class pressure, the rise in trade was accompanied by an increase in state inter­vention in the economy, and capitalism grew faster than ever. This rapid growth meant that profits also grew. The capitalists, anxious to avoid strikes and other disruptions, agreed to share some of it. Wages were raised. Wel­fare states began to develop, at least in Europe, where the labour movement was strong. For the time being (and only partially), capitalism had overcome what Marx had defined as the two intrinsic barriers to capitalist develop­ment – the nation-state and private property.

The United States’ all-powerful position in the capitalist world was a sta­bilizing factor, as it kept the other imperialist nations in check. A coun­terweight existed to curb the arrogance and autocratic behaviour that in­evitably result from such strength. This was provided by the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe (the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and East-Germany), where capitalism had been abolished and which were under Soviet domination.

The bureaucratic elite that ruled the Soviet Union had no need to expand once they had consolidated their spheres of influence. They were mainly interested in preserving the status quo (peace and quiet, no change). The atom bomb had changed the international situation, no individual capitalist could be sure of surviving a nuclear war. The outcome was MAD (Mutu­ally Assured Destruction). The two great powers divided the world into two equally matched power blocs.

Relative calm prevailed in many parts of the world, but below the surface there were simmering tensions and frequent conflicts between the US and the Soviet Union. This was known as the Cold War, as it never heated to open warfare between the superpowers. Basically, it was a trial of strength between two opposed social systems on a global scale: capitalism versus the planned economy. These differences were never settled. On the con­trary, they led to wars by proxy and a monstrous arms race that devoured enormous sums of money. Many people feared the worst on numerous occasions; at the time of the ‘Cuba crisis’ in 1962 there was a dramatic con­frontation between Moscow and Washington, but that eventually came to nothing. None the less, the situation was tense.

Workers who had suffered two world wars did not want a third global con­flict. And during the economic upswing that followed the Second World War, the working class grew dramatically in strength. Many former peasants and small businessmen were employed in industry. In Germany, for instance, the proportion of farmers and peasants declined from around 40% of the population prior to the Second World War to just 2% by the 1980’s. Countless small firms were put out of business by the major corporations. The work­ing class rapidly became more organized, and as a result Labour Parties were voted into office in many parts of Europe. Calls for disarmament and for an end to nuclear proliferation won increasing support. Big demonstrations were held in favour of nuclear disarmament in the late fifties and early sixties.

National wars of liberation

While relative stability reigned in the industrialized countries, the same could not be said of the poor countries of the world. Colonization led to the development of national consciousness in these regions, which in turn led to revolts. The countries of Latin America became independent as early as the 19th century, but ended up in the shadow of the increasingly power­ful United States. Colonies elsewhere were swept by a storm of popular uprisings after the Second World War. Hundreds of millions of oppressed people fought for national sovereignty and social justice in China, India, Indochina, and Africa. And they won.

Many third world countries paid a heavy price for their independence. In a later chapter we take up the indescribable brutality with which the struggle for independence in East Timor was met (and the deceitful role the United Nations played in that conflict).

But imperialist aggression was not only encountered during the actual strug­gle, but also, and often more so, after independence. Imperialists insinuated the tried and tested method of divide and rule into the very foundations of many newly independent states. This created the hotspots of international conflict that still exist to this day, for example the wars between India and Pakistan and the conflicts in the Middle East. Both are taken up in the fol­lowing chapters.

But even in those countries that succeeded in establishing reasonable sta­ble and coherent nation states their problems were far from over. Packing British or French generals off home, taking control of the administration and hoisting your own flag is one thing; it is quite another to compete on a capitalist basis with highly developed countries. In practice, freedom for the former colonies was the freedom to be exploited by the same imperialist companies as before independence. So in many places the fight for national and social liberation continued. Leaders such as Gamal Nasser in Egypt, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Ali Bhutto in Pakistan all called themselves ‘socialists’ and nationalised some sectors of the economy. When the term ‘Third World’ appeared in the 1950s, it was used specifically to describe developing coun­tries that remained outside the power blocs, and therefore had some room to manoeuvre between the US and the Soviet Union.

In countries such as China, Cuba and Angola, the movement went much further. There, an army of peasants and students, a guerrilla movement, overcame the old order of rich landowners and capitalists. In other places, such as Syria, Ethiopia and Afghanistan, where the working class was very weak, groups of officers seized power and abolished capitalism. They were the only group with sufficient cohesion to act against the disintegra­tion of society.

None of these movements were under democratic control and they actively opposed the organisations of the working class. They were inspired by the successes of the Soviet Union, and later China, and established regimes that were very similar to the one in the Soviet Union. However, when small im­poverished countries declared themselves socialist, it was not at the initiative of the Soviet Union. The bureaucrats in Moscow, as noted, wanted nothing to upset the prevailing world order, and leftist revolts meant conflicts with the Western powers. Once the revolts began, the Soviet leaders did provide support, albeit reluctantly. After all, such developments did strengthen their country’s position in the world.

The Soviet Union dominated its allies politically and militarily, but it is wrong to suggest that it pursued imperialist policies. Except for the imme­diate post-war period, it did not exploit its satellite states economically. On the contrary, it subsidized them for years, and living standards were gener­ally higher in the countries of Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union. Soviet oil was sold to the East European states at greatly reduced prices, and goods were purchased from members of the COMECON (the East European equivalent of the EU) at prices above those charged in the world market. Cuba alone received subsidies worth a million US dollars a day from the 1960s up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.4

The new Stalinist regimes in the Third World introduced reforms in such areas as healthcare and education, so they were popular. The Revolutionary Council that seized power in Afghanistan in 1978, for instance, wrote off small farmers’ and leaseholders’ debts to loan sharks and big landowners, and redistributed land to poor peasants. The Council also banned the patri­archal tradition of selling young women as brides, and launched a literacy campaign for men and women.

The imperialist powers were worried by the spread of Soviet type states throughout the world. The US responded by intervening militarily, on 40 occasions since the Second World War.5 Among the best known interven­tions were the Vietnam War, the CIA-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973 and American involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Apart from numerous military interventions, a common US tactic was to build up and sponsor fundamentalist groups. For the American Govern­ment, the ruling principle was ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend”. This was first applied in the 1950s when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and ap­peared to be bringing Egypt under the wing of the Soviet Union. The US subsequently applied the same tactics against all leftist governments that came to power in Muslim countries.

In Afghanistan, in particular, the fundamentalists were supplied with huge amounts of weapons and money by the US and by reactionary Arab states. This funding was channelled primarily through the CIA and the Pakistani security service, the ISI. In the spirit of the US administration, the film Rambo III portrayed the fundamentalists as freedom fighters. The US turned a blind eye to the fundamentalist opium fields, as long as they con­ducted their Jihad (holy war) against the leftist government and the Soviet Union. Where US backed right-wing dictators were in power, such as Zia ul-Haq in Pakistan, fundamentalists’ armed gangs were allowed to attack labour demonstrations, meetings and activists.

Imperialist manoeuvres and wars against countries that, despite their lack of democracy, were lifting millions of people out of poverty and disease in­spired big anti-imperialist movements in the advanced countries. The fight against the Vietnam War was in the centre of this movement. It is taken up in a later chapter. It was a unique period in world history and therefore the movement against the war was uniquely successful.

____________________

1 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861876-2,00.html

2 Sebastian Balfour: Castro, 2000

3 National Bureau for Economic Research, March 1977

4 Ted Grant: Russia from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, 1997

5 www.adbusters.org/magazine/39/interventions

If a person has no hope of staying alive,

he at least does not want to die in vain.1

Tadeusz Patzer, concentration camp survivor

As analyzed in the previous chapter, the Second World War was mainly caused by the struggle between imperialists for the redistribution of markets, and their desire to defeat the Soviet Union. However, within this war the German Nazi Government waged a war against Jews, Roma, and many other ‘undesirables’. The causes of this war are even more shrouded in darkness than the causes of the Second World War. In general the Holo­caust is defined as a one off evil event standing outside of history and bear­ing no relationship to what was before or came after. This is false.

What is equally false is the widespread myth that there was no resistance in the concentration camps. The creation of concentration camps and the subsequent Holocaust did create the worst possible conditions for fighting back. But, given those circumstances, what is remarkable is not the lack of resistance, but that the resistance was a large as it was.

Racist ideology

Nazism is usually presented as an evil ideology completely alien to all other ideologies. And thus it is easy to conclude that Nazism has nothing to do with British, French or American imperialism. But many aspects of Nazi ideology were familiar features in the developed capitalist countries.

Nationalism was its main ideological basis. In imperialist states, nationalism meant placing the values and interests of one’s own nation above those of other nations. This presupposed that the common values and interests within a nation were greater than those between people internationally. Pre­cisely what these values and interests were was unclear. They were usually associated with flags, accounts of heroic battles in the past, language, and ‘the national character’.

Towards the end of the 19th century, as the working class grew, organised and began to challenge those in power, the bourgeois state needed an ide­ology that could reduce social tensions, something which could give the impression that all classes shared a common interest. In pre-capitalist socie­ties, this role had been occupied by religion. Nationalism took its place.

This, in turn, was combined with racism. Hitler consciously put forward the division of humanity into races as an ideological alternative to the Marxist view that society was divided into classes.2

The Nazis were not alone in mixing nationalism with racism. The brutal oppression practised by all imperialist powers in the colonies required some form of justification, and the solution was to view those being oppressed as inferior creatures. This was combined with a quasi-scientific notion of genetics that gave birth to a new form of racism.

In ancient Rome, the Romans were of course considered superior to their slaves, who generally came from conquered territories. But a slave could become a Roman if he was freed by his master, and a Roman could be­come a slave. In the film Gladiator, Russell Crowe falls from his position as one of Rome’s most successful generals to that of a slave. In medieval times, the Jews were victims of widespread discrimination, but persecu­tion usually ceased if they converted. Often, the Jews were forced to do precisely that. Modern racism makes no such allowance. A person from an ‘inferior’ race has the wrong genes, and that cannot be changed. The inevitable conclusion is that the ‘superior’ race must be cleansed from such alien elements.

The first law permitting compulsory sterilisation was introduced in Indiana (United States) in 1907. In time, seventeen other American states followed Indiana’s example, and in 1926 this was sanctioned by the US Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed the opinion of the court as follows: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” 3 It is not so strange, therefore, that in 2000 a study concluded that “The comparative histories of the eugenical sterilization campaigns in the United States and Nazi Germany reveal important similarities of motiva­tion, intent, and strategy”4 In Sweden, too, such ideas took root among the bourgeoisie. Nor was the right wing of the Social Democratic Party immune to the ‘spirit of the times’. In 1935 the Social Democratic govern­ment introduced a sterilisation law, despite the opposition of the left in the Swedish Labour Movement. Between 1935 and 1976, some 63 000 people underwent compulsory sterilisation in Sweden, many of them Roma or travellers. Only Nazi Germany sterilised a larger number of people.5

Nazi racism was directed primarily at the Jews. Anti-Semitism was not unique to Nazism. Hitler was an admirer of the American car manufacturer Henry Ford, and the feeling was mutual up to the entry of the US into the Second World War. One of Ford’s newspapers had, as early as 1920, pub­lished a series of anti-Semitic articles headed The international Jew: the world’s foremost problem.6 Hitler and Ford agreed on the myth that 75% of all Com­munists were Jews.7

Anti-Semitism was widespread, also in Britain. The British Nazis, organised in the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and led by Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet, had 40 000 members at their peak in the 1930s. The party had many supporters in the upper echelons of British society. King Edward VIII was one of them. Hitler intended to use him as a puppet monarch in Britain, if Germany had won the war.8

Hitler adopted ideas that were already widespread and combined them with ‘socialist’ rhetoric in order to enlist the sympathy of poorer sections of the community. The ‘Aryan race’ was described as superior, and the Jews were made scapegoats. They were blamed for all the misfortunes suffered by the German people. A kind of mysticism was also added to the brew.

Forcing the Jews out

Initially, the Nazis wanted Jews to emigrate from Germany. They tried to achieve this by isolating and tyrannising the Jewish community. By legisla­tive means, they forced successive categories of Jews out of public life, confiscating their property and imposing special pass laws that separated Jews from the rest of the population.

For Jews themselves, however, the problem was not only getting out of Germany but getting into other countries. Major obstacles were put in their way. Sweden was among the countries that wanted to stop Jews at its bor­ders, and together with Switzerland was responsible for making their escape more difficult. It was at the initiative of these two neutral states that the Germans began stamping the letter J into the passports of Jews in October 1938 so that foreign customs officials could immediately identify and stop them at the border.9

9 November 1939, Crystal Night, more than six and a half years after Hitler seized power, marked the first wholesale destruction of Jewish shops and synagogues, and the murder and mass deportation of Jewish citizens be­gan. Some 30 000 Jews were sent to the concentration camp at the village of Dachau, a few kilometres from Munich. It was the first sizeable group of Jews to be sent there simply for being Jewish.10 The pogrom-like acts of violence were largely carried out by SA and SS groups. These were not uncontrolled, spontaneous attacks by ordinary citizens. The lack of popular enthusiasm shown on Crystal Night convinced the Nazis and other anti-Semites in the German administration that Jews would have to be forced out in a more organised, planned way. 11 The majority of Germany’s 500 000 Jews fled. 170 000 German Jews were killed later.12

Once Hitler had occupied Eastern Europe, millions of Jews were under Nazi control. In July 1940, there was talk of driving the Jews out of Eu­rope by shipping them to the island of Madagascar.13 This line of approach was not unlike the plans put forward by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, concerning the way the EU should deal with asylum applicants. He suggested they be sent to special ‘zones’ in Albania, Moldavia or possibly Morocco. 14 Oliver Letwin, home affairs spokesman of the opposition Tory Party, thought that asylum seekers should be dispatched to an island “far, far away”. Blair’s plan foundered when Greek government spokesman Panos Beglitis declared that “Europe must remain a democratic area that grants political asylum and does not have concentration camps”. Hitler abandoned his Madagascar project in late 1940. In the autumn of 1941, he closed German borders to all Jewish emigration. 15

The ideological predecessors to the Holocaust

The French diplomat Joseph Arthur Graf von Gobineau is believed to have been the first person to seek to openly justify the extermination of the Jews. He argued that the ‘Aryan’ race, the creator of civilisation, should not allow itself to be stained by Jews and others.16 The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has also been blamed for inspiring Nazi anti-Semitism. But Go­bineau had yet to write his essay and Nietzsche was only six years old when the great British liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote that imperial­ism had done civilisation a service by clearing the earth of inferior races of men. Civilised states in pursuit of “the great scheme of human happiness” were justified in exterminating the lower orders that stood in the way of this goal. 17 Spencer’s liberalism and emphasis on the freedom of the individual only applied to selected parts of the human race.

Spencer was by no means alone in his views. This kind of thinking was widespread in Britain in the 19th century. These ideas were a reflection of what was going on in the colonies.18

The Tasmanians were the first nation of people to suffer total extermina­tion. Tasmania is an island roughly the size of Ireland. In 1803, the first col­onisers arrived, and within a year the massacres had begun. As in the case of the North American Indians, it was not the massacres by themselves that led to the demise of the Tasmanians. The killings were just a prelude to the seizing of their land, the annihilation of all the kangaroos on the island, and the import of thousands of sheep – owned, of course, by the invaders. With their livelihoods gone, many islanders succumbed to disease. In 1829, the British government representatives decided to gather together the re­maining Tasmanians in a form of ghetto (or reserve, as it was called) on the barren west coast of the island. 5 000 soldiers, 45 metres apart, combed the island to make sure no Tasmanians were hiding from the administration. Of the 2 000 natives who had welcomed the first whites when they stepped ashore, only 300 remained. Many of these quickly became alcoholics, and the women gave birth to fewer and fewer children (a normal reaction at times of crisis, even in modern industrialised states.) When Darwin visited the island in 1859 – just 56 years after the arrival of the white colonisers – all the men had already died. The last Tasmanian woman, Truganina, went to her grave in 1876.

Wherever colonial powers have gone, they have left only scattered groups of people and shattered social structures in their wake. Whole native com­munities have been wiped out in the name of civilisation and racial supe­riority. When Hitler attacked Jews, he was treading a well-worn path. What the imperialist powers had been engaged in for decades in the colonies, he tried to achieve in a matter of a few years in Europe.

Other colonial regimes had implemented their genocides far away from home. This was not only for geographical reasons. Public opinion, not least the Labour Movement, would not have tolerated genocides if they could have got first hand information. Germany only had room to expand next door, and was able to do so because the Labour Movement had been completely smashed in Germany.

Colonial expansion

The Holocaust was part of the Nazis ‘Urge to go East’ (Drang nach Osten) strategy to create more ‘Living space’ (Lebensraum) for German people. This reactionary dream was born at the end of the 19th century. Britain, and to some extent France, had made conquests throughout Africa and Asia. All that was left for Germany to conquer were the under-developed states of Eastern Europe. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Germany and Britain would share the world between them. He was appreciative of the British, particularly of their aristocracy. After the war, Günther Blumentritt, the general in charge of the German forces in France, described how Hitler reacted when he heard that France had capitulated in June 1940:

“Hitler was in very good humour, he admitted that the course of the campaign had been ‘a definite miracle’, and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in six weeks. After that he wished to conclude a reasonable peace with France, and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain. He then aston­ished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but ‘where there is planing, the shavings fly’. He compared the British Empire with the Catholic Church – saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent.” 19

Hitler’s drive for Lebensraum was directed principally at the Soviet Union. He wrote in Mein Kampf that he was particularly interested in the fertile ter­ritory of Ukraine, and wished to develop a colony similar to the imperial society created by the British in India: “What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us … The German colonists ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvel­lous buildings, the governors in palaces … The Germans – this is essential – will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress The least of our stable-lads will be superior to any native.” 20 This type of society survived in South Africa – a country shaped by British imperialists – right up to the mid-1990s.

Having completed the occupation of Eastern Europe, the Nazis and their local supporters began launching pogroms. Thousands of Jews were killed. But it was not until January 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, at the notorious Wansee conference, that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” became official policy – the Holocaust.21

Three years earlier, the Nazis had begun the policy of gassing ‘incapacitat­ed’ citizens, the physically disabled and the mentally retarded, using carbon monoxide in specially-equipped vans in Poland. Soon afterwards, ‘Action T4’ was launched, directed at the same groups in Germany. At least 120 000 people fell victim to what the Nazis termed ‘mercy killings’ in this way. The methods were subsequently refined and applied in extermination camps.

The first concentration camp was established in the village of Dachau. By the end of 1933, some 150 000 political prisoners (Communists, So­cial Democrats and union activists) were already held in concentration camps.22 Originally they were called ‘re-education centres’. Later they were renamed concentration camps, as they ‘concentrated’ the enemy into a confined space. The Spaniards had invented this type of labour camp in Cuba, but the Nazis were inspired by the British use of them in South Africa during the Boer War. Hitler also dispatched beggars, prostitutes, homosexuals, alcoholics, religious fundamentalists and the disabled to the camps. In the early stages, some of the inmates were tortured, but the only ones who were killed were those who sought to escape and those classed as ‘incurably insane’.23

There were plenty of concentration camps in Germany, and the death toll in them was of course high: conditions were far from humane. But the ‘ex­tinction camps’ (Vernichtungslager) – where the main aim was systematically to gas people – were all but one situated in Poland (the only exception was a small camp in Byelorussia). As people arrived at these camps over half were selected to die at once. Most of the rest were worked to death.

These death camps were built after mass shootings became more and more difficult to implement. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, wrote after the war that many of the ‘task forces’ (Einsatzkommandos) involved in the mass murders went mad or committed suicide, “unable to endure wading through blood any longer.”24 Extermination camps were a way of de-personalising the mass killings and conducting them more efficiently. In Belzec they could kill 15 000 people a day, in Sobibor 20 000, in Treblinka and Majdanek 25 000. In Auschwitz, a giant hall was built where 2 000 peo­ple could be killed in just three minutes.

Of the approximately six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half were Poles (85% of all Polish Jews were murdered) and a quarter were from German-occupied territory in the Soviet Union. The others came from the smaller Jewish communities throughout the rest of German-controlled Europe. The extermination was thorough there too. 90% of Latvian and Lithuanian Jews,25 as well as 75% of all Dutch Jews perished.26

Bearing in mind the Nazis’ anti-Semitic ideology, it was only logical that the Jews should be the main group of people to make room for German colonisers. Jews were of such an inferior order in Nazi eyes that they were classed as a non-race, i.e. they had no place among human beings.

In fact, however, all people in the East were considered inferior. Nazis ranked Russians only just above Jews, and the other Slavic people close to Russians. The Auschwitz gas chambers were built in May 1940 to put Soviet prisoners of war to death. It was not until the spring of 1942 that atten­tion was focused on Jews. In all, 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died of starvation, cold or disease, or were shot by firing squad or gassed to death – 57% of all Soviet prisoners. Only 3.5% of US and British prisoners of war died in captivity.27 As many non-Jewish as Jewish Poles, three million, ended up in the death camps.

Like sheep?

The myth about the Second World War has three parts. Firstly, that the Allies fought the Second World War for freedom and to save the Jews. Secondly, that the Holocaust can only be explained by metaphysical terms such as evil. And finally there is the notion that many, especially Jews, were ‘lead like sheep to the slaughter’. Kazimiera Ingdahl, professor of Slavic language at Stockholm University, writing a review of a recently published book about anti-Semitism in Poland, connects to this idea. Referring to the concentra­tion camps in Poland, he writes that Poles

“saw with their own eyes the persecutions, the violence and the murders, they heard with their own ears the silent lamentation of people condemned to death, with their own sense of smell they smelt the sweetly smoke that puffed out of the crematoria.”28

But somehow, according to him, they managed to completely miss the ex­tensive resistance that went on in the concentration camps. How is it pos­sible that heroic acts in the midst of one of mankind’s darkest experiences are barely mentioned in the history books?

Resistance was far from easy, especially in the extermination camps, and even at its height resistance involved only a minority of concentration camp inmates. But that makes the resistance even more significant, not less.

The first pre-condition for resistance was to avoid demoralisation in condi­tions that were deliberately designed to completely degrade and de-human­ize. Immediately upon arriving at the camps prisoners were systematically beaten and had their name removed and replaced with a number. There were no rules other than complete obedience. Anybody in charge had the right to beat any prisoner to death at any time. Food was at starvation level. A struggle to gain privileges, or even survival, at the expense of ones fellow inmates was actively encouraged.

In order to combat this brutalisation it was necessary to create activities that kept people together. Political study circles, prayers, and schools for the children, all played a role in upholding peoples’ humanity.

Radio receivers (and a few transmitters) were stolen, paid for by bribes to the guards, or put together from scrap. They played an important role in keeping contact with the outside world and maintaining hope. They were even used, when the execution of a particular group was planned, to get the British army to warn via the BBC that if that was to happen there would be severe repercussions.

Prisoners working in the infirmary could save lives by for example exchang­ing the identities of living people with those who had already been murdered. The resistance even developed methods of removing the identification num­bers that at a later stage were tattooed onto the arms of inmates in the death camps. Documents were forged to help people to escape so that they could inform the world about what was going on in concentration camps.

Acts of sabotage were undertaken. When the old crematorium at Dachau could no longer handle the increased demand, construction begun on a new larger one with several ovens and a gas chamber. A detail of inmates headed by a mason inmate received the following instruction from him: “Com­rades, the gas chamber through which all of us may be intended to march must never be finished! Work slowly? No, sabotage wherever you can!” The cement did not bond properly, the foundation turned out to be too weak, and the mortar in the brickwork crumbled so that whole sections had to be torn down and rebuilt.29

In practically all camps where inmates were forced to work on arms pro­duction there were many acts of sabotage. These ranged from the simple misplacing of the right size screws to advanced technical solutions to dam­age the manufacture of arms while allowing them to pass inspection. At Auschwitz the production at the German Armaments Plant declined by 50% within a few months, when systematic sabotage begun. In January 1943, Hitler ordered every tenth inmate to be shot in factories where pro­duction defects were suspected of being caused by sabotage. 30

Some of the most spectacular sabotage was undertaken at Dora, a subsidi­ary camp to Buchenwald, where the V-rockets were produced. Reports have filtered through of Russians urinating on transformers and other sensitive parts of rockets. A Pole and a Frenchmen put a powder into the oil for the missiles. Electric wires were torn. Rheostates removed. Of the 11 300 first generation V-1 rockets launched one-fifth failed at start. The second gen­eration V-2 rockets fared no better. Only half of the 10 800 fired reached their targets. The rest fell apart in the start area, exploded in the air or fell into the North Sea. To counter-act the sabotage the SS developed a net­work of agents in the plant. All in all 300 to 400 inmates were tortured and executed.31

The moral effect upon the prisoners of sabotage was at least as important as the difficulties it caused the Nazis. “Sabotage is like wine” was a phrase used frequently by Polish female inmates to express the elation felt among prisoners after a successful sabotage.32

Uprisings

There were also direct confrontations with the SS guarding the camps. Be­fore entering the gas chambers, disguised as showers, the intended victims were given bread and told that they had to get cleaned. This was to encour­age them to go peacefully, but despite this there are many examples of people refusing to enter peacefully and even of attacks on the guards. When 1700 Hungarian Jews were to be exterminated at Auschwitz in October 1943, one third of them rebelled in the dressing rooms before being herded into the gas chambers were the others already had been killed. A handful of SS men were disarmed and one of them killed. After a wild shootout, the rebels were let out one by one and shot.33

At Mauthausen (not an extermination camp) in Austria almost 500 took part in an attempted breakout. They attacked the guards with wooden shoes and fire extinguishers and carried out tables and rags to protect themselves when they climbed over the electric fence. 419 managed to get out, despite being shot at by the guards, their reduced strength and their unfamiliarity with the surrounding area. 17 survived.34

At Auschwitz, 300 men, mainly Hungarian and Greek Jews, working on a special detail in the crematories and gas chambers knew that they would eventually be executed for being ‘privy to secrets’. They prepared them­selves. Jewish women, who worked in a factory, smuggled explosives and other chemicals to them. They attacked the SS men, blew up the crematorium and cut the wire fence with pliers with insulated handles. The inmates at another crematorium also disarmed their SS guards and killed them. The uprising was set off prematurely and therefore did not get as far as planned. The inmates at two other crematoriums were unable to join them and the gasoline that was stored to burn down the barracks was not used. There were no survivors of this uprising, but three SS junior squad leaders had been killed (the first Nazis to be killed at Auschwitz) and twelve others wounded. The crematorium could not be used again.35

An even larger uprising took place at Treblinka in 1942. But the biggest and most successful rebellion was at the extermination camp Sobidor in October, 1943.

A couple of weeks before the uprising a group of Russian Jews who had served as officers in the Red Army had arrived. They immediately attracted the respect of others, not least one of them – Aleksander Pecherskii. He distinguished himself by turning down rewards of bread, margarine and cigarettes offered to him by the SS for his fast work. He was approached by a fellow inmate who called upon him to flee. However, he turned this down saying that there would be bloody reprisals on those left behind, and that ways had to be found to help as many as possible to escape. When he was asked why Russian partisans did not liberate the camp, he replied: “Our work cannot be done for us by other.”36 After that, the already existing un­derground resistance group offered him the leadership.

An international structure was established to prepare the uprising. Under the disguise of a Yom Kippur celebration in one of the barracks where al­most all of the 500 to 600 inmates gathered, a general discussion about the uprising was held. Tasks were assigned to various subgroups. Everything was carefully planned.

After the uprising and breakout the Lublin police drew up a balance sheet: “On Oct. 14, 1943, ca. 5 P.M., rebellion of the Jews in the SS camp Sobibor, 40 km north of Chelm. They overpowered the guards, took possession of the arsenal, and after a gun battle with the other camp personnel they fled in an unknown direction…9 SS men killed, 1 SS man missing…1 SS man wounded…two foreign guards shot. Around 300 Jew escaped, the others were shot or are in the camp. Troops, police and the Wehrmacht were im­mediately notified and secured the camp around 1 A.M. The area south and southwest of the camp is being combed by the SS and the Wehrmacht.”37

At a trial at Hagen in 1965, the prosecutors got the addresses of 32 survi­vors. Three others had died after the war. They estimated that 50 to 60 of the inmates had escaped certain death thanks to the uprising.38

Removed from history

It is an extraordinary fact, that the resistance in the concentration camps is practically unknown to most people. Why are all the horrendous details of the beatings, the gas chambers, the gruesome medical experiments ex­plained in great detail, but the resistance is passed by? Where are the major Hollywood releases about the sabotage and uprisings?

The plain truth is that the people who fought back are doubly victims. Not only were they the victims of the Nazis, they were also the victims of the Cold War. Most of them were Communists. And therefore by definition incapable of heroism.

Individual communists were not more heroic than non-communists. Al­though there were some outstanding individuals among the communists, there were also individuals who betrayed their fellow inmates to the SS for an extra piece of bread. However, most communists had a moral advantage. The shock of being transformed from being regarded as solid citizens to being treated as non-human beings was not as great. For communists the struggle in the concentration camps was a continuation of the struggle that they had waged against the capitalist system for years. Under far worse con­ditions, yes, but nonetheless basically the same struggle. They also had the advantage of being used to disciplined collective struggle. But these were not the main reason why their resistance was greater and more effective. The point was that the way the camps were organised meant that it was the communists who had the greatest possibility of organising resistance. As the police report above about Sobibor shows, the numbers of guards at the camps were not many in proportion to the number of prisoners. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, had consciously created another system to maintain control over the camps – the playing out of different nationalities against each other. He established a kind of system of prison­ers’ self-rule, based upon one nationality getting privileges for ruling over others. There was a hierarchy with Jews and Roma at the bottom and Ger­mans, Austrians and Scandinavians at the top. And at the very top were the German common criminals – murderers, thieves, and rapists. They were put in charge of each “block” of barracks and had absolute power over the inmates living there. At least in the beginning. As the number and size of concentration camps grew, German political prisoners and people from other nationalities could also become block leaders. Towards the end of the war there were even some Jewish ones.

Any effective resistance had to cut across this system and organise along internationalist lines. Polish officers were also a group that provided some resistance in the concentration camps, but their nationalism and anti-Semitism effectively made any joint activities very difficult.

Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out for persecution by Hitler and many ended up in concentration camps. Their anti-war stance and refusal to serve in the army was completely incompatible with Nazi ideology. And many did courageously resist the Nazis. But their willingness to die rather than to have anything to do with war was counter-acted by their cult of obedi­ence. They refused to escape and therefore needed no guards. As they were industrious they were often given service positions in the homes of the SS and even in the home of Auschwitz commandant Höss. He commented that they were “strange creatures” and that “one served an SS leader and anticipated his every wish, but as a matter of principle she refused to clean uniforms, caps, boots, and anything connected with the military; in fact, she never even touched such things.”39

The basic glue of all the biggest and most long lasting underground or­ganisations, such as Combat Group Auschwitz, were all based on working class internationalism. In the Auschwitz and Sobibor uprisings a key role was played by the international veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Their inter­nationalist credentials had already been proven in battle.

Working class internationalism also made it possible for the resistance to build bridges to the civilian population working in and around the camps. One participant comes to the conclusion that among the civilians they came in contact with “the best contacts were…the plainest people in such offices, like boiler-room attendants, craftsmen, and cleaning crews.”40

One survivor commented wryly that international Jewish solidarity, depict­ed under the catch word “world Jewry” and described as very dangerous in Nazi propaganda, was nothing but a myth.41 Many Jews did become com­pletely demoralised. As one from the Auschwitz resistance put it: “’Some­thing could be done’ only with those who had once had some contact with the workers movement.”42

Before the Second World War many Jews had participated in the Labour Movements throughout Europe. Many of the leaders in the German, Rus­sian, Polish, and French Labour Movements were Jewish.

When the ghettoes were established by the Nazis throughout Eastern Eu­rope as a first step towards the Holocaust, these fighting traditions were upheld. The uprising of the Warsaw ghetto is well known, perhaps because it inspired the Warsaw uprising that followed. But it is less known that fight­ers of ZOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Fighting Organisation), the biggest resistance organisation, were in the main socialists. In the midst of the uprising they gathered on the 1st of May to sing the Internationale. This does not appear in films about the uprising such as The Pianist. Nor is it known that there was resistance of one form or another in almost all of the 356 ghettoes.

However, there was also another trend among Jews – a nationalist bour­geois one. Many Jewish leaders in the ghettoes tried to make deals with the Nazis and told people to stay calm. These leaders hoped that they could get the Nazis to agree to get rid of some Jews by sending them to Palestine, never mind the rest.

As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to “study” the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokes­person for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in U.S. immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge. He stated: “It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference … It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws.”43

No wonder it was left to those with a conscious faith in the struggle of the international working class to wage the only possible struggle in the ghettos and concentration camps against the Nazis.

_________________________________________________

1 Quoted in Against all hope by Hermann Langbein, 1994

2 Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, 1925

3 Hywel Probert in the New Statesman, 15 April 2002

4 Dr Andre Sofair and Dr Lauris Kaldjian: Yale Bulletin, 18 February 2000, http://

www.yale.edu/opa/v28.n21/story10.html

5 Svenska Dagbladet, 6 July 2003

6 www.us-israel.org/jsource/anti-semitism/ford.html

7 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERantisemitism.htm

8 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/MONedwardVIII.htm

9 www2.amnesty.se/mcveigh.nsf/tt30?OpenPage

10 www.levandehistoria.se/infowebb/1921/utskrift1921_1945.html

11 Zygmunt Bauman: Auschwitz och det moderna samhället, 1994

12 www.levandehistoria.se/infowebb/1921/utskrift1921_1945.html

13 ibid

14 Guardian, 11 October 2003

15 http://history.acusd.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/holocaust.html

16 Joseph Gobineau: The Inequality of Human Races, 1857

17 Herbert Spencer: Social Statistics, 1850

18 Sven Lindquist: Utrota varenda jävel, 1992

19 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERblumentritt.htm

20 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSbarbarossa.htm21

www.levandehistoria.se/infowebb/1921/utskrift1921_1945.html

22 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERconcentration.htm

23 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERconcentration.htm

24 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp

25 Catalogue of the Stockholm exhibition, Deutschland, Deutschland, 1979

26 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands

27 Sven Lindqvist: Utrota varenda jävel, 1992

28 Svenska Dagbladet: 23 April, 2008

29 Sepp Plieseis: Vom Ebro zum Dachstein. 1946

30 Herman Langbein: Against all hope. 1994.

31 ibid

32 ibid

33 ibid

34 ibid

35 ibid

36 ibid

37 ibid

38 ibid

39 ibid

40 ibid

41 Sim Kessel: Perdu á Auschwitz, 1970

42 Report of the Communist Party Group of the Jawiszowice Concentration Camp quoted in Herman

Langbein: Against all hope. 1994. Jawiszowice was a satellite camp to Auschwitz.

43 http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/antisemitism/holocaust/index.cfm

Dear Madam, Sir, Miss or Mr and Mrs Daneeka. Words cannot express the deep per­sonal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.

Joseph Heller: Catch-22, 1961

To most workers around the world thought the Second World War was a justifiable war. In contrast to attitudes before the First World War, many supported war on Hitler’s Germany. But the leadership of the work­ers parties’ lacked an independent program for working class action against Hitler’s armies. This lead to a dangerous delay in the fight back, and once the struggle begun workers had to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. The story is the same throughout the world.

What they wanted

After Hitler’s victory in Germany Nazi armies fanned out over Europe. The Second World War was a fact. And for once it looked as if the imperialists of Britain, France and the US had common interests with Stalin and the international Labour movement. But this was an illusion that proved ex­tremely costly to workers.

For the capitalists of Germany, Britain, Italy, the US, Japan and other coun­tries, the war was about the redistribution of global markets and defeating the Soviet Union. Just like World War I. In practice, they also engaged in a parallel war against the working class in a number of countries, in order to prevent any move towards socialism. Removing a dictatorial regime in one or another country was of secondary importance.

Right up to 1939 the US, Britain, France and Sweden continued to trade with Germany and have political dealings with the German regime. The leaders of the allied countries were not particularly negative to Hitler’s dictatorship. The former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George (a Liberal) visited Germany in September 1936. He returned with glowing accounts of Nazi Germany and Hitler: “It is a happier Germany. I saw it everywhere and Englishmen I met during my trip and who knew Germany well were very impressed with the change. One man has accomplished this miracle. He is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart.”1 Germany was allowed to occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia. It was not until Ger­many began to seriously threaten the balance of power in Europe by invad­ing Poland that Britain and France declared war on Germany. 2 Even then, the US remained neutral.

For the Stalinist bureaucrats, who only became directly involved when Germa­ny invaded in 1941, the Second World War was a matter of defending their privileges and extending them further. They viewed the workers of the various countries as pawns that could be sacrificed when it suited them.

For workers the Second World War was not only a battle between opposing imperialist powers. For them the war against Hitler was also a fight to de­fend the organisations of the working class and the democratic rights they had won after decades of struggle. In countries that were occupied by the Nazis, all such advances were eradicated.

Moreover, the Soviet Union still enjoyed the sympathy of much of the in­ternational Labour Movement, despite Stalin’s dictatorship. This was clear from the rise in Communist Party membership in many countries. Many of those who had experienced the depression saw the Soviet Union, with its remarkable economic growth, as a viable alternative. They did not want to see it destroyed by Hitler.

The leadership of social democratic parties and Stalin were reluctant to fight Hitler

Hitler occupied large areas of Europe without encountering much resistance. Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium all surrendered within weeks of being attacked. The capitalists in these coun­tries did not object to cooperating with the German Nazis, as long as they let them get on with business as usual. In France, the government preferred to hand over Paris to the Nazis, after very little fighting. In 1939, the French Army had 900 000 regular soldiers. It had another 5 million men who had been trained and could be called-up in time of war. They were hardly used.3 Probably the memory of the Paris Commune, when workers who had been armed to fight Germany had taken power in Paris, stopped the French Government from a mass mobilisation of its forces. On 10 July 1940, the National Assembly met and decided by 570 votes to 80 (with 20 absten­tions) to hand over all power to Marshal Philippe Pétain. He established a Nazi puppet government, known as the Vichy regime. Many Socialist MPs were among those who voted against the move, but the great majority fol­lowed in the footsteps of the bourgeois parties and voted in favour.4

The European Communist parties did not resist Hitler either. This was due to the grotesque non-aggression pact that Hitler and Stalin signed in 1939. Stalin agreed to it because of his severe domestic problems. He saw threats to his position everywhere, and most of all he feared his own officers in the Red Army, who had defeated both domestic and foreign enemies, and were regarded by many as heroes. Also, it was Trotsky, Stalin’s principal rival, who had built up the Red Army. Stalin was foolishly convinced that he was go­ing to be the victim of a plot led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other military leaders. The evidence consisted of false documents supplied by Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and the Nazi secret police.

In 1937, therefore, Stalin executed Tukhachevsky and 35 000 other experi­enced officers of the Red Army, just when they were needed most.5 Among those eliminated in the purge were three of the army’s five marshals, eight admirals out of nine, 50 corps commanders out of 57, 154 divisional com­manders (generals) out of 186, and all eleven deputy ministers of defence.6 After his drastic purge of the Red Army, war was the last thing Stalin wanted. He seems to have believed that the pact with Hitler would protect his country, or at least delay any assault. To the very last, Stalin refused to credit the reports from his own intelligence service that an attack by Ger­many was imminent.7

Instead of following in the footsteps of the bourgeoisie and Stalin, the leaders of the Socialist Parties and Communist Parties should have openly prepared for an armed struggle. If the bourgeoisie had opposed the arming of the population, they would have had popular support for expropriating the bourgeoisie. Then, they would have had a solid base from which to ap­peal to the German soldiers to join them in the fight against Hitler. With a similar tactic the Bolsheviks managed to defeat the combined might of all invading armies after the Russian revolution.

This was not such a far fetched perspective considering that in 1936 Leon Blum of the Socialist Party became the first avowed Marxist to be elected Prime Minister of France. In Belgium, Social Democrats were in the Gov­ernment until 1937. In Denmark and Norway, the Social Democratic Par­ties were in power before Hitler invaded. However, none of the leaders were prepared to put forward such an alternative.

Soviet workers pay the highest price

In June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. By that time, he had virtually all the resources of Europe at his disposal. Stalin was completely unpre pared. Not wishing to provoke Hitler, he had refused to mobilise. During the first few days of the attack Red Army units were even ordered not to return fire. Before anyone responded, 2 000 Soviet planes had been destroyed.8

With war thrust upon them, Stalin and his regime could no longer compro­mise. Unlike the bourgeoisie in occupied Western Europe, the regime could not co-exist with Nazism. At first, the Red Army could offer little resistance to the German army, but after a while the advantages of a planned economy over a market economy – bureaucratic distortions notwithstanding – be­came clear. The Soviet Union dismantled all the factories in the path of the advancing Germans and reassembled them in safety on the other side of the Ural Mountains. Between July and November 1941, no less than 1 523 facto­ries were shifted in this way, 1 360 of which were described as large-scale.9

At the same time, crops were burnt and the German army was restricted by extremely long supply lines. The entire Soviet population was mobilised against Hitler. The turning point came at Stalingrad, where fighting raged from August 1942 to February 1943. The defenders fought street by street, building by building. Some 100 000 German soldiers were killed before the Red Army launched one of the mightiest counter-attacks in history. In just three months, it pushed the Germans back more than 300 kilometres. The Battle of Kursk – the greatest tank battle in the history of modern warfare – broke the backbone of the German army.

During this decisive struggle, neither the US nor Britain were prepared to join the fighting in Europe to any great extent. They were content to rain bombs on German cities and towns. US Vice President Harry S. Truman outlined the American strategy: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we should help Russia, but if Russia is winning, we should help Ger­many. Let them kill each other as much as they want. Although I don’t wish to see Hitler triumph under any circumstances.”10

Only in North Africa did the British army engage the Germans directly. They wanted their colonies for themselves. But a look at the places where Germany had positioned its military forces, shows that fighting was limited there compared to the Eastern front.

Where the German divisions were in June of each year

Countries	1941	1942	1943	1944
USSR	34	171	179	157
France & Benelux	38	27	42	56
Norway & Finland	13	16	16	16
Balkans	7	8	17	20
Italy	0	0	0	22
Denmark	1	1	2	3
North Africa	2	3	0	0

www.angelfire.com/ct/ww2europe/stats.html

In a triumphant advance, the Red Army had by March 1944 recaptured all Soviet territory, and begun to move into Poland. The D-day landings in Normandy did not take place until after this, on 6 June 1944. Any further delay in opening a western front against Germany would have allowed the Soviet army to press on all the way to the English Channel.

Soviet losses were huge. Some 13.6 million Soviet soldiers and 7 million civilians died in the Second World War – more than ten per cent of the population. This can be compared with the loss of 326 000 British soldiers and 62 000 British civilians (less than one per cent of the population), and the loss of 500 000 US soldiers. Almost no American civilians died.

Many Soviet lives could have been spared. Many died because the Soviet Union was ruled by an incompetent dictatorship that beheaded the army before the war began. And the Soviet bureaucracy made no attempt to appeal to German soldiers; on the contrary they put forward propaganda dehumanizing the German population, thus driving them back into Hitler’s embrace. However, a large part of the responsibility for the casualties lies with the leaders of the Labour Movement in Western Europe that left the Soviet Union to fight almost alone against Hitler’s massive resources.

Italian workers fight for a socialist society

In Italy, despite being obstructed by their leadership and the allies, the work­ing class showed how a successful war could be waged against Hitler. They combined the struggle against Hitler with the struggle for a new society.

Like Germany, Italy had experienced a revolutionary period following the First World War. But the working class was much weaker than in Germany and after it was defeated, the Italian Fascists were able to seize power in 1922. Benito Mussolini became the new head of government. He was backed in Italy by the same social forces that later backed Hitler in Germa­ny. During Mussolini’s dictatorship, Italy built a powerful military machine. In the mid-1930s, the Berlin-Rome Axis pact was established, and when the Second World War broke out, Fascist Italy sided with Hitler. As the war progressed, the Italian working class began to offer resistance.

In March 1943, a spontaneous strike broke out at the Rasetti factory in Tu­rin, and spread later to the giant Fiat Mirafiori factory. The work stopped in protest over working conditions. Further strikes followed in Turin and northern Italy, until some 100 000 strikers were taking part. This was the first instance of collective organised resistance against fascism in Italy. In April, the employers and the government were forced to grant concessions.11

The strike represented the culmination of years of growing discontent. Lack of enthusiasm for the war was reflected in a series of military set­backs. These defeats, in which thousands of Italian soldiers surrendered without a fight, gave rise to the enduring myth of the ‘cowardly’ Italian soldier. But why should Italian soldiers fight in poor countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya and Albania for Mussolini and the Italian capital­ists’ dream of an empire?

Aided by a political movement with ties to the Sicilian Mafia, American and British troops landed easily in Sicily in July 1943.12 The Allies cooperated with the Mafia because it represented an alternative power centre in south­ern Italy, outside Mussolini’s control. At the end of July 1943, Mussolini was deposed following a coup organised by Field Marshal Badoglio and the Italian king, who had initially supported Mussolini’s bid for power. Badoglio had previously commanded the Italian forces that had sought to colonise Ethiopia, and had since then been known as the ‘Butcher of Ethiopia’.

When the leaders of the coup surrendered to the Allies, Germany imme­diately stepped in and occupied most of Italy. Badoglio and the king fled Rome, establishing their base further south as the Allies ‘Italian govern­ment’. From Sicily, the Allies fought their way up through the country and, after the local population had risen up and thrown out the German army, captured Naples in October 1943.

In March 1944, a new series of strikes broke out. In the Milan region alone, some 300 000 workers downed tools. These strikes were directed specifi­cally at the Nazis. The workers demanded immediate peace and an end to the manufacture of war supplies for Germany. The stoppages spread to the textile factories of Venice, Bologna and Florence, where mainly low-paid women worked. In June, when the Nazis tried to dismantle machinery for removal to Germany, the Fiat workers went on strike again and succeeded in thwarting the plan. Farm workers, meanwhile, refused to send grain to the German forces of occupation.

When the Allies entered Rome on 5 June 1944, they met little German resistance. The Germans did not defend Rome. Defeat at the hands of the workers of Rome was imminent. The Allies were worried at the prospect of a popular revolt, so they bombarded Rome with leaflets before ‘liberating’ it. The leaflets read: “Citizens of Rome, this is not the time for demonstra­tions. Obey these directions and continue your regular work. Rome is yours! Your job is to save the city, ours is to destroy the enemy.”13

The Communist Party played a leading role in the Italian resistance. In Florence, the Allies had arrived too late to stop an uprising. It had broken out at the beginning of August 1944, and thus the partisans were able to appoint their own governor of the region – a move that was not at all popular among the Allies. The events in Florence set alarm bells ringing in Allied circles, and during the bitter winter of 1944-45 the resistance movement was given almost no support. The partisans nevertheless fought on, and no Nazi troops dared enter working-class areas in the major cities in Northern Italy.

During the spring of 1945, the third and largest wave of strikes swept Northern Italy, involving over a million workers. In Turin, a general strike broke out in April. Factories were occupied. This was the starting signal for uprisings in Genoa and Milan. In Genoa, the workers took 9 000 German soldiers prisoner and forced them to surrender to the partisans – not to the Allies. By 1 May, the whole of Northern Italy had been liberated, not just from Nazi oppression, but also from the rule of the employers.14 The people had even managed to protect the Italian factories from being destroyed by the Nazis. Committees deeply rooted in the working class emerged through­out the region and took over the reins of local government. They assumed control both of the public sector and of industrial production. Fascists were ejected from the state administration and from many private companies.15

As a rule, the factory workers pursued their struggle unarmed. But hun­dreds of thousands of Italians (actively supported by at least as many more) took part in armed guerrilla actions against German and Italian fascists. Some 100 000 partisans and their civilian supporters died in the fighting.

The Allies’ contribution to the struggle in northern Italy consisted of the RAF (the British Royal Air Force) carrying out large-scale bombing raids on Milan, Turin, Bologna and other cities in the region. Working-class areas in particular were targeted. In other words, the Allies bombed those people who were at the forefront of the local anti-fascist struggle. While they did drop some supplies to the partisans, so as not to appear too one-sided, these consisted only of a few weapons – and chocolate. The supplies were mainly channelled to the smallest and non-communist part of the resist­ance movement.

Had they contributed weapons and other kinds of support to the popular uprising, the whole of Italy would have been liberated with the loss of far fewer lives. But in that case it might all have ended in a socialist revolution, and this was something neither the Allies nor the leadership of the Italian Communist Party wanted to see. They prevented such a development.

60% of the partisans were Garibaldini, i.e. Communist members of the un­derground. Towards the end of the war, the Communist Party also gained considerable support in the factories. Up to then, it had not been able to control the struggle. Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian party, returned from Moscow in March 1944 with strict instructions from Stalin not to carry out a socialist revolution in Italy. Accordingly, the Communist Party gave its backing to the reactionary Badoglio government and shelved its demand for the establishment of a republic. After the war, the party joined a coalition government with the Christian Democrats, but was eventually ejected, when they had tamed the revolutionary movement. For many years thereafter, Italy had to suffer a government of Mafia-backed Christian Democrats.

War on the Greek people

In Greece, the resistance against the Nazis was even more successful, but British troops, abetted by Stalin, stopped the movement violently.

Before the war Greece had been within the British sphere of influence. In early 1941, the British government had persuaded the Greek king to let British troops into the country. However, when the Nazi army invaded in April of that year, they defeated the combined British and Greek forces in a couple of months. The British soldiers were rapidly evacuated, and the fight against the occupying troops was left to the partisans.

The Greek people suffered tremendous hardship. The invaders confis­cated the summer harvest to feed the 300 000 occupying troops from Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. During the winter of 1941-42, more than 200 000 Greeks died of starvation, but the resistance movement grew. People in rural areas gave the guerrilla fighters shelter, despite barbarous acts of vengeance by the Nazis. In 1943, unarmed workers demonstrated in Athens against sending people to labour camps in Germany. At least ten Greeks were shot dead and some 100 badly wounded. But the dem­onstrators won the day – Germany thereafter refrained from recruiting forced labour in Greece.16

Churchill did not wish to provide support to a mass movement in which so­cialist ideas were prominent. In April 1943, he issued instructions that only royalist resistance groups were to be supplied with weapons and informa­tion by British agents.17 It was only due to the surrender of the Italian army in 1943 that the Greek Liberation Army (Ellinikos Laïkos Apeleftherotikos Stratos, ELAS) got access to large supplies of arms. Throughout the war, the British government provided massive funding in a bid to build up guerrilla groups that slandered and attacked ELAS.

Despite this, ELAS tried to cooperate with the Allies. They provided the bulk of the force that blew up the strategic Gorgopotamos railway bridge. This cut the German supply lines through Greece and caused problems for Hitler’s campaign in North Africa. During the months when the British and the Americans were planning their landing in southern Italy, ELAS also carried out a series of sabotage actions in order to distract the attention of the German and Italian forces.

ELAS was the armed wing of the National Liberation Front (Ethniko Ape­leftherotiko Metopo, EAM). This was a broad organisation, dominated by the Communist Party. In liberated areas, they opened schools and medical cen­tres, available to all. They even appointed a provisional government (Poli­tiki Epitropi Ethikis Apeleftherosis, PEEA) based in the mountains. The PEEA’s relief organisation provided food to the starving. People’s courts were set up to administer justice, and the administration was both efficient and relatively free from corruption.18

EAM refused to recognise the Greek king. The king had fled to Cairo with his right-wing government when the country was invaded. When news of the provisional government reached the Greek troops in Egypt in April 1944, they mutinied against the exile government and demanded that the PEEA be recognised. The mutiny was put down by the British.

By the autumn of 1944, up to two million Greeks out of a total popula­tion of seven million had joined the EAM.19 ELAS had more than 77 500 members in its standing army, plus 50 000 reservists and 6 000 members of a national militia.20 When they expelled the German army from Greece in October 1944, EAM/ELAS were in control of virtually the entire country except Athens and Salonika.21 In effect, the Greek people had taken power.

EAM/ELAS would doubtless have succeeded in throwing out the British, too, if it had not been for the actions of Stalin, and thereby of the Greek Communist Party. In October 1944, Churchill and Stalin met in Moscow to decide how Europe should be divided up. It was there that Greece’s fate was settled. In his memoirs, Churchill revealed how the conversation had developed. “So far as Britain and Russia are concerned,” he had told Stalin, “How would it do for you to have 90% predominance in Rumania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?” He handed a half sheet of paper with these figures scribbled on it to Stalin, who ticked it and handed it back to Churchill. “It was all settled,” writes Churchill, “in no more time than it takes to set down.” The British leader was anxious that the exchange might be thought “rather cynical” and offered to burn the paper. “No, you keep it,” replied Stalin.22

The British government sent its troops back into Greece, this time to crush ELAS. The British forces released fascist prisoners from jail and armed them. Security forces and gangs who had been on the side of the Nazis right up to their withdrawal were offered new uniforms and given new tasks by British General Robert Scobie, commander of the Allied forces in Greece.

The leaders of the Communist Party became entangled in a series of agree­ments with the British, and tried to persuade the working class to accept them, probably on the orders of Stalin. The party began by joining a coali­tion under George Papandreou, a puppet of the British. But this regime did not last long. When Scobie demanded that the guerrilla fighters hand in their arms, while allowing Nazi collaborators and royalist companies the freedom to roam the streets and threaten people with their weapons, the government collapsed. The EAM and PEEA ministers resigned. A general strike and demonstrations were scheduled for the beginning December 1944 to pro­test at Scobie’s dictatorial actions. When the streets of Athens were filled with demonstrators shouting “Not another occupation!” and “Rule by the people!”, strategically positioned police gunmen opened fire.23

The following day, full-scale war broke out between the British military forces and EAM sympathisers in Athens. Churchill sent firm instructions to General Scobie: “Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress …We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.” The fighting lasted for 33 days. The leaders of the Communist Party forbade ELAS fighters living in the mountains to go to Athens, whereas Churchill sent in strong reinforcements.24 The British used both machine guns and bombs to quell the revolution. In a speech in Parliament, Churchill made it clear that he understood what was at stake: “It was a struggle to prevent a hideous massacre in the centre of Athens, in which all forms of government would have been swept away and naked triumphant Trotskyism installed…I think ‘Trotskyists’ is a better definition of the Greek Communists and of certain other sects than the normal word, and it has the advantage of being equally hated in Russia (Laughter and cheers).”25

Over 11,000 people died and large areas of Athens were destroyed.26 Even Churchill was amazed that Stalin “adhered strictly and faithfully to our agreement of October, and during all the long weeks of fighting the Communists in the streets of Athens not one word of reproach came from Pravda or Izvestia.”27

The Greek Communist Party continued to collaborate with the occupying power, and in February 1945 its leaders signed the fateful Varkiza agreement under which the guerrilla movement was to be disarmed. The decision was taken against the wishes of the ELAS leadership. Photographs show the partisans weeping as they handed over their weapons, and they had good reason for doing so. The government (now led by an army general) had promised democracy, a purge of collaborators and a general amnesty, but what followed was a reign of terror. When those who had been active in EAM/ELAS could no longer defend themselves, fascist gangs systematical­ly sought them out to take revenge. The army and gendarmerie, too, which had been largely built up by right-wing activists and Nazi supporters, dealt mercilessly with left-wing sympathisers of all shades. Many guerrilla fight­ers were murdered, while others were forced to flee back to the mountains. By the summer of 1945, some 50 000 people from the Greek resistance were being held in prison camps that resembled concentration camps.

To the last, Captain Aris (Aris Velouchiotis), the founder and leader of ELAS, hoped that the Communist Party would change its mind. This never happened. Instead, the Communist Party publicly disowned Aris and re­voked his party membership. Not wishing to split the movement, Aris and his closest aide saw no alternative but to commit suicide.

In post-war Britain, the Labour Party was returned to power, but this did not help the Greek Left. During the war, the Labour Party leadership had collaborated with Churchill’s Conservatives, and the new government declared that it intended to pursue the same policy with regard to Greece as its predecessor.

Despite the disarmament drive, a full-scale guerrilla war broke out anew in 1946. The partisan movement rose again as the Democratic Army, but this time under much tougher conditions. With economic and military aid from Britain, the Greek government built up its own army. Nevertheless, by 1947 large areas of Greece were once again in the hands of the Communists. The British government now felt its support of the Greek regime was too costly. So it turned to the US for help.

The American president, Truman, immediately responded by proclaim­ing the ‘Truman Doctrine’, stating that the US would “fight Communism wherever it appears in the world”. This marked the beginning of the Cold War and, as a result, colossal sums of money were poured into Greek gov­ernment coffers during the civil war. A joint Greek-American command was set up, roads were built for military use, and tanks and fighter jets were purchased. New methods and weapons – including napalm – were tried out on the recalcitrant Greeks. The leaders of the Communist Party, mean­while, demanded that the Democratic Army switch from guerrilla tactics to conventional warfare. This caused disastrous losses.

The end of the Greek partisan resistance movement finally came with the conflict between Stalin and the Yugoslav leader, Tito. The Greek partisans had had a sanctuary in Yugoslavia from which they could make raids into Greece. But in 1949, Tito formally closed the border to Greece, as the Greek Communist Party leadership insisted on remaining loyal to Stalin.

In the years 1940 to 1950 Greece lost a tenth of its population through war and starvation.28 700 000 people out of a total of seven million. Another 700 000 fled the country.29

After the war, the Communist Party was outlawed. Widespread persecution, imprisonment and executions continued for years.

Slaughter of civilians in Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki

During the First World War, almost the only ones to die as a direct result of the hostilities were combatants. At the beginning of the Second World War, too, bombing targets were largely military – radar stations, aircraft factories and airports. But this approach was to change dramatically.

As anti-aircraft fire became effective, a large number of planes were lost. So in September 1940 the German Luftwaffe (air force) began carrying out large-scale bombing raids on British cities at night, although this meant less precision. The number of civilians killed in German raids grew rapidly. It was this air campaign against British urban centres that was known as the ‘blitz’. The British RAF eventually replied in kind.

In 1940, Charles Portal was put in charge of organising British bombing raids. Together with his successor, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, he escalated the bombing to encompass whole cities. In March 1942, he ordered his planes to attack Lübeck. More than half of the city was destroyed. For the bombing of Cologne, at the end of May 1942, the RAF assembled all the planes at its disposal, numbering over a thousand.

The British bombing campaign against Germany culminated on the night of 13 February 1945 when the RAF attacked Dresden, a picturesque medi­eval city in Eastern Germany known as the Florence of Northern Europe.

This was followed by two nights of bombing by the US Air Force. There were no war industries in Dresden and the city was of no military sig­nificance. Also, it was undefended at the time as no anti-aircraft guns were stationed there. A few months earlier, in October 1944, a detailed report on Dresden as a potential bombing target had been produced. It concluded: “Compared to other towns of its size, Dresden is … an unattractive blitz tar­get”.30 The population, which in normal circumstances totalled around 600 000, had almost doubled in 1945 as a result of the influx of people fleeing from the advancing Red Army.

The British air force rained thousands of incendiary bombs on Dresden. The bombing was so intense that individual fires joined up and the city was engulfed by a firestorm. The temperature in the city centre has been esti­mated at 1 000 degrees Centigrade. Huge amounts of air were sucked into this inferno and created an artificial tornado. People were dragged into the firestorm by the wind. Those who hid in cellars were suffocated as the air was sucked out by the firestorm, or they died from the heat.

At least 35 000 people were killed in that raid. (Some sources put the death toll as high as 100 000).31 In Dresden, few battle-hardened soldiers lost their lives. Most of the dead were children, women and the elderly, and wounded soldiers. The railway station was left standing – the only target of any mili­tary value. The bombing of Dresden is sometimes depicted as an act of revenge for the bombing and destruction of Coventry by the Luftwaffe. But only 380 people died there.

The aim of the bombing raids was to demoralise the German people and punish them for the deeds of the Nazis. This is how Churchill described the bombing strategy in a speech on 22 June 1941: “We shall bomb Germany by day as well as night in ever increasing measure, casting upon them month by month a heavier discharge of bombs, and making the German people taste and gulp each month a sharper dose of the miseries they have show­ered upon mankind.”32 With that attitude Churchill, aided by his coalition partners from the Labour Party, undermined all possibilities of appealing to German workers to rise against Hitler.

British bombers killed an estimated 600 000 civilians and destroyed or se­verely damaged six million homes during the entire course of the war. The Luftwaffe killed just over 62 000 British civilians.

After Dresden, however, Churchill felt it was time to end this type of war­fare. Ordering an end to the attacks, he explained: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, should be reviewed”.33 Whatever one may think about Churchill, he at least called things by their proper name – something that Blair and Bush carefully avoid doing.

In the war against Japan, the US followed Britain’s example. In a recent in­terview, former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara talked about his experiences in the Second World War: “I was at Guam in March 1945 when my unit killed 83 000 civilians in one night by firebombing them with our B-29s. We burnt them to death. This was the first of 67 firebombing raids. An awful lot of people died. General Curtis LeMay, who led the operation, said: ‘If we lose this war, we’re going to be put on trial as war criminals’.”34

Finally, atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Over 200 000 people died. Sixty years on, many people in Japan are still suffering from the damage that the bombs caused. In military terms, it was a totally meaningless act. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of US forces at the time, was opposed to the bombings: “Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”35

While Eisenhower was a skilled general, he did not fully understand the interests of capitalism. The atom bomb was needed to terrorise the coun­try’s inhabitants and pave the way for US dominance of Japan after the war. More important, it was a warning to Stalin and the Soviet Union. James Byrne, who was US Secretary of State when the decision to drop the atom bombs was taken, had told Truman that in his view, “the atom bomb could put us in a position where we could dictate the post-war terms ourselves”. He was referring specifically to US terms vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Nu­clear physicist Leo Szilard describes a meeting he had with Byrne: “Mr Byrne did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war. . . Mr. Byrne’s . . . view [was] that our pos­sessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”36

Britain and the USA: An alternative approach

Parts of the British and American Labour Movement advocated a policy that would have connected to the revolutionary resistance in Europe, and if implemented would have reduced the cost of fighting Hitler consider­ably. Right in the middle of the war, when all citizens were under heavy pressure to back the ‘war effort’, these Marxists urged the working class to fight Hitler on their own terms. They called attention to the strong anti-Nazi stance of the workers and showed how this might serve as a basis for democratic struggle. In November 1942, Ted Grant, leader of the Revolu­tionary Communist Party and later ideological leader of the International Marxist Tendency, described their policy in an article in the British journal Socialist Appeal:

“The British workers want to see a real end made to Hitlerism of all varie­ties and to the domination of one nation by another. They want to win the peoples of Europe to their side in a common struggle against these evils … They want a genuine international ‘united strategy’ that will enable these tasks to be performed and bring about a truly democratic and lasting peace. But while imperialism sits in the saddle there can be no such thing.

“These aims can only become a reality that is transferred from the realm of words to that of deeds, when the workers take effective measures against imperialism. Such measures would necessarily include the granting of immediate freedom to India and the colonies, the nationalisation under workers’ control of the banks and all heavy industry and the armaments industry; the election of officers by the soldiers and the merging of the armed forces into the armed people. Only when such measures have been taken would Britain’s war be transformed into one genuinely being fought for national liberation and in defence of the Soviet Union. Only a govern­ment of the workers can take such measures. Only a workers’ government can lay the basis for a genuine ‘united strategy’ of a global nature. For the only force that cuts across national frontiers and continental barriers is the common interest of the working masses against capitalism.”37

However, the leaders of the Labour Party were not interested. They sat in the war time coalition cabinet lead by Churchill. They denied help to the Italian and Greek resistance movements. They supported the violent crush­ing of the Greek revolution. And not least they supported terror bombings against the workers of Germany and Japan. Unlike during the First World War, Marxist policies were too weak to influence the course of the war. They had been ground down by Stalinism, fascism and reformism.

All attempts to appease or adapt to the policies of bourgeois parties or movements – however democratic they claim to be – proved disastrous. Different sources offer widely differing estimates of the number of people that died in the Second World War. The table below claims that 52 million people died. Whatever the exact amount, there can be no doubt that it was a war with an unprecedented amount of casualties. Nazism could have been overcome without the loss of so many lives if labour leaders had put for­ward an independent policy, basing themselves on an international working class struggle against Hitler and for socialism.

After the war, when there was a chance to express oneself openly, the working class showed what they felt the war had been about – against fas­cism and for a new society. A wave of revolutionary fervour swept Europe. Communist and Socialist parties came to power in places like France and Italy. In Britain, Churchill the ‘war hero’ was thrown out, and Labour came to power with the biggest majority and the most radical programme in its history. In the US, too, the workers were radicalised and the greatest wave of strikes the country had ever seen got under way. At the centre of the strikes were the car workers at General Motors.

American soldiers were also drawn into the massive wave of protests. Many of them had gone into the army to fight fascism. When the US administra­tion sought to use the soldiers in 1945 as occupying troops in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and the Philippines, it encountered tough resistance. The soldiers found the government’s plans unacceptable and launched a protest movement

www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/statistics.htm

based on the demand, ‘Bring Us Home!’38 Generals were jeered, members of Congress were flooded with protest letters (10 000 a day just from wives and girlfriends who wanted their men back), and the soldiers set up special committees that organised meetings, demonstrations and strikes. In January 1946, the soldiers’ committee in Manila represented 139 000 soldiers in the Philippines who demanded to be sent home. Their demands were officially supported by the big American labour organisations, the AFL and the CIO.

Due to the sabotage of labour leaders, the ideas that could provide the soundest base to resistance against Hitler, before he came to power and once he had come to power, were not used. In the concentration camps, socialist ideas were the only ideas that could inspire an effective resistance to Nazism.

1 http://www.history-of-the-holocaust.org/LIBARC/ARCHIVE/Chapters/Stabiliz/

Foreign/LloydGeo.html

2 Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany at the same time.

3 http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2wwfrenchA.htm

4 www3.uakron.edu/hfrance/reviews/caron.html

5 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUStukhachevsky.htm

6 Karl-Olof Andersson: Europa i 1900-talets spegel, 2003

7 Leopold Trepper: The Great Game, 1977

8 Lesley Thompson, Resistance and revolution in Europe in World War II

9 Ted Grant: Russia from revolution to counterrevolution, 1997

10 New York Times, 24 June 1941

11 Gareth Jenkins: The forgotten fighters, 1995

12 Dr. Toscano: Sicily and its struggle for independence, 2003

13 www.army.mil/cmh-pg/brochures/romar/72-20.htm

14 Gareth Jenkins: The forgotten fighters, 1995

15 Michael Kelly: The Italian Resistance in Historical Transition, 2003

16 Kostis Papakongos: Kapetan Aris, 1975

17 Timothy Boatswain, Colin Nicolson: Historisk guide till Grekland, 2000

18 ibid

19 www.greenleft.org.au/back/1995/198/198p25.htm. See also Konstantinos Tsoulalas:

The Greek Tragedy

20 Till vapen! Till vapen! Krönika över det nationella motståndet, Athens 1964. Cited as a source in

Kostis Papakongos: Kapetan Aris,1975

21 Encyclopeadia Britannica

22 Winston Churchill: Triumph and Tragedy, 1953

23 Timothy Boatswain, Colin Nicolson: Historisk guide till Grekland, 2000 and Kostis

Papakongos: Kapetan Aris, 1975

24 Timothy Boatswain, Colin Nicolson: Historisk guide till Grekland, 2000

25 Quoted in Ted Grant: British Labour betrayed Greek Workers, 1945

26 Historisk guide till Grekland, 2000,

27 Winston Churchill: Triumph and Tragedy, 1953

28 Encyclopaedia Britannica

29 IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies)

30 www.learningcurve.pro.gov.uk/heroesvillains/churchill/churchill_1.htm

31 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm

32 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWarea.htm

33 ibid

34 Dagens Nyheter, 25 januari, 2004

35 Dwight Eisenhower: Mandate For Change, 1963

36 Leo Szilard: A Personal History of the Atomic Bomb, 1949

37 Ted Grant: History of British Trotskyism, 2002

38 Art Preis: Labours Giant Step – 20 years of the CIO, 1964

 Preface

 War and Resistance is a translation of the Swedish book Draksådd, originally published in 2004. It offers a Marxist analysis of the most important wars of the past hundred years; examines the role of UN, civil disobedience and many other failed attempts to stop war. And as a contrast explains why other forms of resistance to war have been successful.

The book starts in Scandinavia at the beginning of the 20^th century, goes through the two world wars, including resistance in concentration camps, then goes on to the conflicts in the Indian sub-continent, the Middle East, Vietnam and East Timor, and ends with contemporary wars in ex- Yugoslavia, Africa and Iraq.

Contrary to expectations after the collapse of Stalinism in 1989 this subject remains as relevant as ever, most recently in the light of renewed imperialist intervention in Libya. We will regularly publish chapters from the book, starting with the introduction today.

The authors of the book are Kerstin Alfredsson, Jonathan Clyne, and Lena Ericson Höijer, all longstanding activists within the Swedish Labour Movement. They would appreciate any comments about the book.

Worldwide                              admin@karlmarx.net
Sweden, Martin Lööf          martin.loof@gmail.com

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

English proverb

 Faced with the deadly threat of Nazism, the Labour Movement had to decide how to proceed. Would it be best to seek to unite all, including the bourgeois parties, who were critical of Hitler – at the expense of the Movement’s own policies?

Or would it be better to pursue independent policies that above all united the working class against capitalism and its representatives?

The Social Democratic leaders chose the first alternative – and gave way to the bourgeois parties in all respects. The outcome was a disastrous defeat and eventually the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The seeds are sown

Nazism’s road to power began in the early 1920’s, in the midst of the chaos that followed the First World War and the defeat of the German working class in the Revolution of 1918-23.

The First World War had been a miscalculation on the part of the Ger­man ruling class. They had counted on strengthening their influence in the world and acquiring further colonies. Instead, they were forced to hand over extensive territories. The biggest winner was their greatest rival, France, who took back Alsace and Lorraine, and also assumed ad­ministrative control of the Saar region for 15 years. The Saar coalmines were taken over by French companies.

Under the terms of the peace treaty at Versailles, Germany had to admit full responsibility for the war and pay reparations totalling 132 billion gold marks, a huge sum of money at the time. In 1922, when the government of the Weimar Republic1 declared that it was unable to meet the payments, France also occupied the country’s industrial centre, the Ruhr region. In response, the government instructed its citizens to offer passive resistance. To compensate striking workers and company owners who closed down their factories, the government printed banknotes. The presses hummed night and day. When a currency reform was finally introduced in November 1923, the exchange rate was one new mark for a trillion (1 000 000 000 000) old ones.2 Inflation wiped out the savings of small depositors. The rich had fixed assets such as real estate, but those who had kept their money in the bank, above all the middle class, were ruined.

The extreme right was still smarting over the ‘ignominy’ of Versailles and the illusion that Germany had lost the war because it had been betrayed by a fifth column. United in its hatred of all working-class organisations, they made a number of attempts to seize power. As yet there was little popular support for fascism.

Following the currency reform, the economy stabilised for a few years, but at the end of the twenties a new crisis developed. Unemployment began to soar. In January 1929, almost 3 million Germans were out of work. By January 1932 the figure had risen to over 6 million. Poverty and desperation wracked the country.

Politics became deeply polarised. The Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, KPD), which had been set up in 1919, attracted many new supporters in the late 1920s. On the right, Hitler’s Nazi Party (National­sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) suddenly emerged as the leading force. Its growth was spectacular. From having won only 2.5% of the vote at the 1928 elections, it became the second largest party in the Reichstag in 1930, after polling more than 18%.

Leading industrialists invest in Hitler

After some hesitation, many of the leading German capitalists – especially the owners of heavy industry – decided to back Hitler’s party. Their aim was to break up all working-class organisations, notably the Communist Party and the trade unions. Hitler had the ground troops for such a project. In the early 1920s, he had begun to build up a private army of Storm Troop­ers (Sturm Abteilung, SA), helped by a German army major, Ernst Röhm. These troops were largely drawn from the ranks of the Freikorps. Röhm also contributed money from a political fund available to the Germany army.3 In 1925, the storm troopers were joined by the SS (Schutzstaffel), Hitler’s personal bodyguards.

The principal task of the SA and the SS was to use force to attack meetings and demonstrations organised by political opponents. Many of the SA and SS lived in barracks and wore uniforms. The SA wore grey jackets, brown shirts (a whole consignment had been purchased from the German army, which had originally planned to use them in Africa), armbands with a swas­tika, peaked caps and marching boots.

Keeping tens of thousands of men in food and clothing was a costly affair. Factory owners had the money. The leading capitalists of the day had ini­tially viewed Hitler with scepticism. His rhetoric was primarily nationalistic, but was also directed against big business. The party called, among other things, for a redistribution of wealth, and put up posters showing a Nazi worker about to crush ‘international high finance’. In 1927, the prominent industrial magnate Emil Kirdorf, had a meeting with Hitler and outlined his misgivings. 4 Hitler assured him that the anti-capitalist messages were only intended as a means of gaining working-class support, and would not lead to any action. Kirdorf then proposed that Hitler write a pamphlet which could be privately distributed among the leaders of industry, describing the Nazis’ actual plans for the economy. The result was The Road to Resurgence, in which Hitler gave assurances that he supported private enterprise and was opposed to any real transformation of Germany’s economic and social structure. Kirdoff circulated the pamphlet among his powerful friends. As a result, they were delighted. Huge sums of money were pumped into the Nazi Party, the SA and the SS. Hitler spoke later of the astoudingly success­ful campaign of 1930, and asked his listeners to consider “what it means when thousands of speakers each have a car at their disposal and can hold 100 000 meetings a year”.5

Among those who contributed funds were Krupp (Germany’s largest arms industry), United Steelworks, the chemicals giant IG Farben, the head of the Bavarian Industrial Federation, the piano-manufacturer Bechstein, the Flick steel trust, the head of the German Employers’ Federation, von Borsig, and the head of the Ruhr coal syndicate, Kirdorf. The latter, inci­dentally, decided that all businesses affiliated to the syndicate were to pay 5 pfennig to the Nazi Party treasury for every ton of coal they sold. The coal and steel magnate Fritz Thyssen later admitted that he had personally given Hitler a million marks. He had also brought together Hitler and the captains of industry in the Rhein-Westphalen region. Thyssen was one of the very few leaders of German big business to oppose Hitler later on, and he fled the country in 1939.6

Media magnate Alfred Hugenberg was head of the Deutschnationale Volk­spartei, the DNVP, another conservative nationalist party. This party had traditionally represented big business. In 1928 he decided to throw in his lot with Hitler, to give the bourgeoisie greater strength. His support was a tremendous asset. Hugenberg owned three publishing houses, controlled 500-600 newspapers and magazines, and also had a controlling share in a news agency that supplied half of the country’s press with news and fea­tures. Seven banks and a number of paper manufacturers were also under his control.7

The business leaders who invested in Hitler got excellent returns. When he became Chancellor (Prime Minister), independent trade unions were forbidden. Wages were settled at company level. Workers’ collective sick­ness and unemployment benefit funds were abolished, and the money transferred to private insurance companies. Company profits soared from 6.6 billion marks in 1933, the year before Hitler took power, to 15 billion marks in 1938.8 There was indeed a redistribution of wealth in the country – but from the poor to the rich. The capitalists’ share of the gross national product increased over the same period from 17.4 to 26.6 per cent.9 A com­mon misconception is that Hitler brought the economy under state control. On the contrary, even in 1942, in the middle of the war, the Flick group was allowed to buy one of the army’s factories, Machinenfabrik Donauwörth GmbH, for a pittance.10

Failure of the Social Democratic leadership

Germany did not pass from a fully-fledged democracy to a Nazi dictator­ship overnight. There was an extended process over several years whereby the Nazis pushed the country’s bourgeois politicians into stifling democracy – and the leaders of the Social Democratic Party helped smoothe the tran­sition to dictatorship. The Weimar Republic was never a model bourgeois democracy, born as it was on the ashes of the German revolution of 1918-1919. Under the new constitution, signed by the social democratic Presi­dent Ebert in August 1919, the President was elected for seven years and had extensive powers. He could dissolve the Reichstag whenever he wished and issue emergency decrees suspending the constitution. This meant that if he considered the republic was threatened, he could declare a national emergency and pass laws without parliamentary approval. The Social Dem­ocratic leadership helped draw up this constitution.

In 1928, the Social Democrats and several bourgeois parties (including Hugenberg’s DNVP ) formed a coalition government, but it collapsed in 1930. The new constitution was then used against the Social Democrats and the parliamentary majority. President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Heinrich Brüning, a conservative from the Catholic Centre Party, as the new Chancellor. When Brüning failed to secure parliamentary approval for his tough austerity policies, von Hindenburg approved emergency decrees to bypass the Reichstag majority. However, in the end Brüning was forced to call fresh elections.

At this poll, in September 1930, the Nazis became the second largest party in the Reichstag, while the Communist vote increased from 3.5 million (in 1928) to 4.6 million. Faced with this situation, and despite the fact that they were the largest party in the country, the Social Democratic leadership de­cided to tolerate a new minority government, led by the man they had just thrown out of office, Heinrich Brüning. As under the previous coalition government, people who had voted for the SPD’s policies had to put up with conservative policies instead. The SPD representatives in the Reichstag now opposed all calls for a vote of no confidence against Brüning.11 They thereby ensured that he was able to continue as Chancellor and rule the country despite having only a third of the Reichstag behind him. In 1931, the Social Democratic party executive expelled all MPs who had opposed the Brüning regime.12

As the Nazis’ influence increased, the SPD leadership moved further to the right. At the presidential election of March 1932, the SPD did not enter a candidate of its own. Instead, it supported the president in office, the former imperial field-marshal von Hindenburg. This was the same man who, in 1916-18, had headed the Third Supreme Command, a belligerent cabal that in effect ran Germany as a military-industrial dictatorship.13 Von Hindenburg (18.1 million votes in the first round) won over Hitler (11.3 million) and the KPD candidate Thälmann (5 million). He failed, however, to live up to the expectations of the SPD leadership.

It had long been known that the Nazis were making plans to seize power. After the presidential election of 1932, several regional governments urged the Brüning government to ban the SA and the SS. He in fact did so, by emergency decree. In May of this year, however, Brüning angered von Hindenburg when he sought to cancel government subsidies to the big landowners (the Junkers) and introduce a limited land reform programme. Brüning was forced to resign. Von Hindenburg appointed a new govern­ment – dubbed the ‘Cabinet of Barons’ – and made Franz von Papen Chancellor. The new regime immediately revoked the ban on the SA and the SS. These grew rapidly. Within one year they increased from 100 000 to 300 000 members. Under the Treaty of Versailles the official German army was limited to 100 000 men.

In the summer of 1932, the streets became a battlefield. In Prussia alone, more than 200 people were killed in June and July. When parliamentary elec­tions were held on 31 July 1932, the Nazis won almost 40% of the vote and became the largest party in the country. Von Papen offered Hitler the post of Vice Chancellor, but he declined. He had his sights set on higher things.

Hitler becomes Chancellor

A number of government crises ensued. Von Papen was forced to resign, following a vote of no confidence in the Reichstag, and fresh elections were scheduled for 6 November. This time round, Hitler’s steady rise to power was checked. The Nazis were still the largest party, but they lost two million votes and fell back to 33%. The Communists, meanwhile, rose to a record 17%, while the Social Democrats polled just over 20%. Thus, in 1932, the KPD and the SPD together still had more electoral support than the Nazis. Hitler never won a majority.

Despite this setback for the Nazi Party, in January 1933, von Hindenburg – the president whose candidacy had the support of the Social Democrats – appointed Hitler Chancellor of the Reich. He did so reluctantly, at the urg­ing of his closest advisers. A petition from leading industrialists concerned at the growth of the Communist Party also urged him to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.14 In the end he agreed that Hitler should head a bourgeois coalition cabinet.

Thus Hitler was legally commissioned to form an administration. In Febru­ary 1933, someone burnt down the Reichstag. (Most people believe it was the Nazis themselves.) Hitler immediately blamed the outrage on the Com­munists. The following day, he drew up a new emergency decree that was promptly signed by von Hindenburg. It revoked the constitutional laws guaranteeing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of as­sembly and other democratic rights. The same evening, thousands of Social Democratic and Communist supporters were arrested. Some were physi­cally assaulted, some were beaten to death on the spot. During the days that followed, provisional facilities were built to accommodate all the detainees: the first concentration camps.

Soon the workers parties’ officials, premises and newspaper offices were attacked. It was in this atmosphere that what would prove to be the last parliamentary election campaign of the Weimar Republic was held. Only the Nazis and their allies were allowed to distribute political propaganda. Hitler’s future minister of propaganda, Goebbels, wrote in his diary:

“To carry on the fight … we can call on all the resources of the state. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a mas­terpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money.” 15

On election day, the men of the ‘police auxiliary’, a police force formed by the Nazi leader Hermann Goering and drawn from the SS and SA, stood outside most of the polling stations and urged people to vote for the Nazis. Nevertheless, Hitler only managed to win 43.9% of the overall vote on 5 March 1933. A majority of the electorate still preferred other parties. But what did that matter when all the bourgeois party leaders were backing Hitler? On 23 March, Hitler asked the Reichstag to grant him dictatorial powers. The MPs consented, by an overwhelming majority of 441 to 84. All the bourgeois parties, including those with whom the SPD had allied it­self to block Hitler, voted in favour. Only the SPD voted against (the KPD members were either in prison or had fled). Nevertheless, the party agreed to support Hitler’s foreign policy16 and the reorganisation of the trade un­ions along the lines of the ‘Italian model’.17 In Italy, the existing unions had been banned and replaced by ‘trade corporations’ that were supposed to represent both the workers and the employers. In reality, this was a system designed to give the state and the employers control over the country’s wage-earners. Not surprisingly, wages were cut following this reorganisa­tion.18 The Social Democratic Party leaders’ willingness to compromise had turned into capitulation before the Nazis.

There was an inherent logic in the behaviour of the SPD leaders. They saw themselves as honest brokers, rather than leaders of a struggle. When workers demanded higher wages or political reforms, the SPD leadership thought that their role was to sit down with capitalists or their political representatives and negotiate a compromise. In exchange for social peace, some of the workers’ demands were conceded. When the economy was go­ing ahead, that strategy brought some beneficial results for workers, at least when it was backed up with a real threat of strikes and protests. However, when economic development was slow or negative, the capitalists took the initiative and broke the truce themselves. They demanded larger and larger cutbacks, so the whole social democratic strategy backfired. The SPD lead­ership had no idea of how to organise an outright struggle against the dete­rioration of workers’ conditions. Instead, they thought that through nego­tiations, they could prevent the capitalists getting everything they wanted.

The further to the right the bourgeois parties moved, the further the So­cial Democratic leadership moved with them. Having brought down the conservative anti-democratic Brüning government, the SPD parliamentary group proceeded to guarantee Brüning’s survival as the head of a minority regime. And when the Nazis finally sought to abolish all democratic rights – the SPD agreed to restrictions, as long as they were less draconian.

What could the Labour Movement have done instead?

The Labour Movement should have confronted the SA and the SS. The Movement had many more people at their disposal than the Nazis had. They should have arranged for armed guards to protect the meetings, the demonstrations and the people who were threatened. The Labour Move­ment could have struck back when the SA and the SS began terrorising workers and Jews. If the SA and the SS had met determined and unified resistance before 1933, they would have been weakened and demoralised. The course chosen by the leadership of the SPD made such an outcome impossible.

The SPD leadership was unpardonably passive in its attitude to the SA and the SS. A network of ex-servicemen (Reichsbanner Schwarz Rot Gold) was created specifically to defend the republic and the constitution against right-wing extremists, and could call on 3 million members. Four-fifths of its members were Social Democrats.19 Also, following the 1930 elections, a more militant force was set up within the defence system, known as the Schufo (Schutzformation). It comprised 400 000 members, many of whom had been soldiers in the First World War.20 At this time the Schufo easily out­numbered the SA and SS, and also had greater military experience. The SA troopers recruited in the late 1920s largely comprised unemployed young men without any experience of war. But the SPD leadership declined to make use of this force.

The Schufo took some part in the street fighting, but never offered organised resistance on a nationwide basis. To the last, the SPD leaders vainly hoped that the state administration, which had for the most part protected and supported the Nazis armed units, would disarm them. On 5 March 1933, leaders of the Reichbanner divisions in the major cities travelled to Berlin requesting orders to go into action. They were told by the SPD leadership: Keep calm! Above all, no bloodshed! 21

Nor did the Social Democratic leadership offer a political way out of the crisis. They collaborated with bourgeois parties both in the government and in presidential elections. Hence, when unemployment rose to 44% and countless farmers and members of the petite bourgeoisie were left desti­tute, they felt that the SPD was partly to blame. The Nazis, on the other hand, could present themselves as a genuine alternative. Hitler claimed he opposed big business, and because he never accepted any government post until he was able to take power himself, he was never seen as being part of the establishment.

The Nazis were able to gather support among peasants, the ruined middle class and the unemployed. These sections of the population had originally looked to the Labour Movement to represent them, but had been let down. The Labour Movement should have set out to win them back. The only way to do that would have been for the social democratic leadership to have decisively broken with bourgeois parties and presented a clear alternative to capitalist disaster. Time after time the leadership had shown that they were not prepared to do that.

The unions were disabled by their Social Democratic leaders, who instruct­ed them to stay out of politics. They were supposed to limit themselves to defending the immediate economic interests of the workers, whatever the regime. Incredibly, on 1 May 1933, after Hitler had become Chancellor, most of the Social Democratic union leaders decided to cancel the demon­strations they had planned. Instead, they urged their members to take part in the national worker rallies that Hitler and his regime organised on that day. They had thereby sent out a clear message to their supporters: We do not intend to fight these people with every means at our disposal. If you want to fight them, you’ll have to do it without us.

On the following day, 2 May 1933, the Nazis attacked the unprepared un­ions. Premises were occupied, funds were seized, organisations dissolved and their leaders arrested. Many were taken to the newly-established con­centration camps.22

The Communist Party splits the movement

While the Social Democratic Party had lost ground from 1928 onwards, the German Communist Party (KPD) grew in strength. At the elections in November 1932, there was not much between the two parties. The KPD received almost 6 million votes, compared to 7.2 million for the SPD. The KPD was part of the Third International, the Comintern, which had been founded after the Russian revolution, and the party attracted many workers who were hoping to build a better society. But the KPD made the insane mistake of branding social democracy as the twin of fascism, and thus split the Labour Movement. This was another important factor in Hitler’s success.

To understand why the KPD behaved as it did, we must look at what hap­pened in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s.

When the revolution triumphed in Russia, the country was the most under-developed in Europe. The great majority of the population were peasants, and most could neither read nor write. A civil war broke out in which the anti-government forces were backed by many foreign armies, including British, French, American, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, Italian, Roma­nian, Greek, Serbian, Polish, Chinese, and other troops. A blockade was imposed and everything possible was done to bring down the new regime. They failed, as the vast majority of Russians approved of the land distribu­tion programme and the new government’s other reforms. The capitalists and the big landowners were unable to regain control of the economy, but the Soviet Union degenerated in political terms.

The Bolsheviks, who dominated the new government, held that the success of socialism in Russia was dependent on the revolution spreading to the in­dustrialised countries, so that help could be enlisted in that quarter. But the German revolution fell through. This, together with scarcity and poverty, war and exhaustion, meant that a bureaucracy was able to wrest political power from the working class in Russia. To a great extent, this bureaucracy was comprised of people who had never been socialists, among them many who had worked in the old Czarist administration. They now joined the Communist Party and set out to reclaim their privileged positions, this time under a new regime. These officials and careerists were headed by Joseph Stalin. In return for their loyalty, Stalin offered people nice homes, better goods in their own shops and holidays by the Black Sea. Socialist democ­racy was replaced by a monstrous dictatorship.

This dictatorship was not a logical consequence of the revolution but a ter­rible defeat for it. Hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries were purged, sent to labour camps and murdered. The reign of terror that developed in the 1930s, involving the widespread use of informers, show trials, concen­ tration camps and mass killings, was indescribable. All leading Bolsheviks that Stalin considered a threat to his position were ousted and subsequently forfeited their lives.

Lenin had become seriously ill as early as May 1922 and left the political arena after suffering a second stroke in March 1923. Before he died in Janu­ary 1924, he warned people about Stalin. Leon Trotsky – who had been head of the key Petrograd Soviet in both 1905 and 1917, a minister of the first socialist government and the architect of the Red Army’s defeat of the counter-revolutionary forces – was the person who took up the ideological battle against Stalin. He was thrown out of the party, banished from the country and finally murdered by a supporter of Stalin in Mexico in 1940.

In order to subdue the working class, and begin to exterminate almost the entire generation of Bolsheviks that had participated in the October Revolution, Stalin enlisted the support of the peasants, above all of the rich peasants (known as kulaks), and of the petite bourgeoisie. In return, he saw to it that their conditions improved. After a few years, however, they had become strong enough to pose a threat to Stalin himself. The situation came to a head in 1928 when the peasants refused to deliver their crops to the cities. Industrial development had been neglected, so the peasants had nothing to buy for the money they earned from their produce.

At a stroke, Stalin changed course. Industrialisation was now to proceed with all haste, while the kulaks’ land was taken from them and they were forced to work in collectives. Stalin rediscovered the rhetoric of the revolu­tion, and used it as part of the campaign against the kulaks. This rhetoric also had an international dimension. Stalin decided that the workers’ strug­gle worldwide had entered a ‘third period’. The first had been the wave of revolutionary struggle that had occurred in the wake of the First World War; the second had been the period of stabilisation that followed; and a new phase had now started during which the workers should immediately fight for power, regardless of whether they were ready or not.

The policies of the KPD, like those of other Communist parties, were con­trolled by Moscow, so the German Communists prepared to do battle. On the direct orders of Stalin and those around him, they singled out the Social Democrats – or the Social Fascists, as they called them – as the chief enemy. It was, after all, the SPD and not the Nazis who held government office in Germany until 1933.

Like the SPD, the KPD had a military force at its disposal. It was called the Red Front (Rotfront), and numbered around 100 000 men. On occasion, these Communist militia attacked Social Democratic workers (sometimes together with Nazis). Incredibly, in 1931 the KPD came out in support of a regional referendum called by the Nazis. The referendum was directed against the Social Democratic regional government in Prussia. The KPD’s handling of the situation was disastrous, and totally at odds with the policy advocated by the Comintern during the early years of its existence. Under the Comintern’s original policy, the fledgling Communist parties were to seek a united front with the Social Democratic parties on specific issues where they could work together. The actions of the KPD in 1931 destroyed any possibility of a united front against the Nazis.

The working class did not support Hitler

The leaders of both the SPD and the KPD thought Nazism was only a temporary phenomenon that would fade away before long. The Commu­nist leadership argued that the victory of Nazism would expose the true character of capitalism and lead to a proletarian revolution. They failed to realise that a total ban on all freedom of organisation, of expression and of the press would leave the working class completely defenceless. It made collective resistance impossible for years to come. The Social Democratic leadership, like many among the liberal bourgeoisie, believed that the Na­zis could be persuaded to settle down and pursue a more normal political course after a period in power.

The Nazis never won the endorsement of the working class, although some workers in small businesses in rural areas supported them. In his book on the 1933 election, Stefan Svensson comments: “The Labour Movement is largely immune to Nazi propaganda. The opposite is the case among the bourgeois parties.”23 The attempts by the Nazis to set up their own union organisations with the aid of both threats and financial backing from Ger­man industry did not bear fruit until long after Hitler’s rise to power. In the union elections to factory committees in 1933, the Nazi union organisa­tion, the NSBO, won only 3% of the votes, despite the fact that Hitler was already Chancellor.24

Among the workers, there was a solid potential for anti-fascist struggle. A report from the International Left Opposition (a group of Communists, in­cluding Trotsky, that opposed Stalin) in Germany in September 1932 noted: “In many places, actual united fronts are to be found. In the street fighting the Communists now run to the aid of the embattled Reichsbanner troops and Socialists, and vice versa. Through the formation of these united fronts in the streets, the Nazis have been repulsed. Indeed, the street fighting has shown that the Nazis are at a disadvantage as their uniform gives them away and they are young people unused to military tactics, while the Socialists and Communists can fire from under cover and their ranks contain multi­tudes of trained and tested soldiers.”25

The leaders of the German Labour Movement – both the KPD and the SPD – could have acted to stop Hitler, but they refused to join forces to fight Nazism, and were passive. The SPD leadership had made the mistake of trusting the state to deal with the Nazis, while the KPD leadership com­plied with Stalin’s directives and did not view the Nazis as a genuine threat. The leaders of the German Labour Movement were not prepared to let the working class wage an independent struggle, with its own methods and policies, against Hitler. And so the working class had to capitulate without having had the possibility of offering any substantial resistance. This is the worst kind of defeat. If one fights and loses, one can at least learn from one’s mistakes and move on. If one fails to engage the enemy, there is noth­ing one can learn and no way forward.

Labour Movement leaders internationally made exactly the same mistakes when they fought against the Nazis invading armies as their German col­leagues had done when they had faced Nazi thugs in Germany. They bowed down to the bourgeoisie and to Stalin. They accepted their own bourgeoi­ sie’s or Stalin’s goals and methods for fighting Hitler. This was to prove as disastrous for the working class internationally, as it had been for the work­ing class in Germany.

1 The republic that replaced the German empire took its name from the town where the members of the Reichstag assembled – Weimar,.

2 Catalogue of the Stockholm exhibition Deutschland, Deutschland, 1979

3 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERroehm.htm

4 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERkirdorf.htm

5 Daniel Guerin: Fascism and Big Business, 1973

6 Frank Hirschfeldt: Catalogue of the Stockholm exhibition, Deutschland, Deutschland, 1979

7 ibid

8 Charles Bettelheim: L’Economie allemande sous le nazisme, 1946

9 Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The structure and practice of national socialism, 1963

10 Klaus Drobisch: Monopole und Staat in Deutschland, 1966

11 Stefan Svensson: Tyskland – en spegling av Europa, 1992

12 Foreword by Lars Lundström to the 1983 Swedish edition of Leo Trotsky’s The Struggle

Against Fascism in Germany

13 http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/F/firstworldwar/index_glossary.html

14 www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERnazi.htm

15 Daniel Guerin: Fascism and Big Business, 1973

16 Catalogue of the Stockholm exhibition, Deutschland, Deutschland, part 1,1979,

17 Foreword by Lars Lundström to the 1983 Swedish edition of Leo Trotsky’s The Struggle

Against Fascism in Germany

18 Karl-Olof Andersson: Europa i 1900-talets spegel, 2003

19 http://www.zum.de/psm/ns/haupt_wider.php

20 www.weltchronik.de/kalenderblatt/all/0224SHRT.HTM

21 Fascism and Big Business, 1973

22 Frank Hirschfeldt: Catalogue of the Stockholm exhibition, Deutschland, Deutschland, 1979

23 Stefan Svensson: Germany: A Reflection of Europe

24 Daniel Guerin: Fascism and Big Business, 1973

25 www.weisbord.org/TwoEight.htm

The new International is rising up,

as logical as a law of nature,

with its leaders if they follow us,

without its leaders if they hesitate,

against its leaders if they oppose us.”1

Stormklockan, the organ of the Swedish

Young Social Democrats 1909-1917

The outset of the First World War was a massive defeat for the interna­tional Labour Movement. Its leaders joined up with the capitalists, the Second International dissolved, parliamentary democracy was severely cur­tailed, and millions of young men were plunged into a blood bath. Yet re­gardless of all these difficulties the anti-war movement came to life again.

A new beginning

In March 1915, socialists from countries at war with each other gathered for the first time since the collapse of the Second International. Clara Zetkin, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, had organised several international women’s conferences for the Second International. Now she convened a conference at Berne in Switzerland. Twenty-nine women activ­ists from Germany, England, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Russia met in secret in Switzerland. The elected leadership of the Second International, the International Socialist Bureau or ISB, was hostile, and the German and French party leadership forbade its members to attend. The Conference Manifesto was widely distributed. 200 000 copies circulated il­legally in Germany.2

A month later young socialists met. A conference was held, despite the opposition of the official leadership of the Socialist Youth International, of youth delegates from nine different national youth organisations. The conference voted to re-establish the Socialist Youth International and set up a secretariat in Zurich. The “Liebknecht fund” was launched to pay for the work, and a quarterly magazine Jugend-Internationale was published. The Youth International organised the first international day of protest in Oc­tober 1915.

The next important step, in September 1915, was a conference convened in Zimmerwald, a small Swiss village. The initiative was taken by the leader­ship of the Italian Socialist Party. At first they tried to convince the ISB to organise it, but the ISB would not be budged. It was attended by official representatives from parties and party factions. Delegates from Britain and some from France were unable to attend because their governments stopped them from leaving the country. In contrast to the giant rallies that had taken place before the war, only scattered remnants of the Interna­tional attended the Swiss meeting.

The conference adopted two policy statements. One was a manifesto written by Leon Trotsky, urging the workers of Europe to end the truce in the class struggle and oppose government war credits. The Manifesto called for peace without any annexation of territory, based on self-determination for all.

The Manifesto was adopted unanimously, but there was a group of delegates who considered it insufficient. They called themselves the Zimmerwald Left and consisted of Vladimir Lenin and Gregory Zinoviev representing the Russian Social Democrats, Karl Radek representing the Poles, Paul Winter the Latvians, and Ture Nerman and Zäta Höglund for the youth organisa­tions in Norway and Sweden. They issued a statement that they voted for the Manifesto because they saw it as a “call to struggle and because we want to march forward in this struggle arm in arm with the other sections of the International”. However, they added that they considered that the Manifesto should have contained a condemnation of all the social democratic leaders who supported the war. Nor did they think the Manifesto explained clearly enough the methods that should be used to fight war.

Few people attended the Zimmerwald conference, and those who did were not totally in agreement. Yet they managed to draw up a set of fundamental guidelines for the continuation of the struggle, and several of those present would in time play a key role in their respective countries. The ideas that emerged from Zimmerwald provided the basis for a mass struggle against the war, not least in Sweden, Russia, and Germany.

The anti-war struggle in Sweden

In the years prior to the First World War, the Swedish monarchy, right-wing parties and military had been urging for the country to rearm. In 1910, the right-wing government initiated negotiations with the German government regarding a Swedish-German military pact against Russia.

This drive for rearmament came to be known as activism. The campaign sought an ‘active’ foreign policy or, as it was phrased later, “courageous backing of the German side”.3 Besides agitating in the press and at meetings, the campaign consisted of fund-raising events to help finance the building of armoured ships. It enjoyed the support of King Gustav V and of his German-born queen, Victoria. Activism culminated in a ‘peasant’s rally’ in Stockholm on 6 February 1914, attended by 30 000 peasants and others from different parts of Sweden. They demanded that Sweden’s defence be strengthened immediately, in view of the tense world situation. The King ap­peared in the palace courtyard to declare his support for the demonstrators.

The Swedish Labour Movement had learnt from the events of 1905, and reacted swiftly. Two days later, the Stockholm branch of the Social Democratic Party organised a workers’ rally in response to the ‘peasant’s rally’. Despite the cold grey weather, some 50 000 people marched to the government offices to demand that military spending be cut and to protest against the monarchy. The police identified the Social Democratic mayor of the city as one of those who had cried “Long live the republic!” For this, he was taken to court and fined 100 crowns. The sum was col­lected in 1 öre coins (one hundreth of a crown) at meetings around the country. “Among the workers, there was a fighting spirit and a belief in victory”, wrote Zäta Höglund, describing the period immediately after the march. “The Social Democrats launched a huge campaign against the rearmament propaganda and the royal coup. During the Easter weekend alone, the Young Social Democrats held 400 meetings to protest against militarism. The halls were packed and discussion usually continued far into the night.”4

But as war approached, the leaders of the Labour Movement came under increasing pressure to fall in behind the ‘nation’, i.e. the bourgeoisie. On the day war broke out, Hjalmar Branting, leader of the Social Democratic Party, addressed an election meeting. There, and in a telegram he later dis­patched to the rightist government then in power, he declared that “in the face of war, the domestic social quarrels of each and every nation, however severe they may be as a result of class divisions, must for the moment be of secondary consideration.” Just like fellow bureaucrats across the continent, he was offering a party truce to the bourgeoisie. However, Branting could go no further than that. The struggle of workers, and the strong and ex­perienced opposition in his party, again blocked the Swedish government’s intention to go to war. So a compromise was made. There was a truce, Branting remained party leader, and Sweden stayed neutral. This was the origin of Swedish neutrality, a policy that all governments were forced to pursue – at least officially – for the rest of the century.

However, the matter was not settled once and for all. The right-wing parties continued to press for Swedish participation in the war, and the Labour Movement continued to resist. Early in 1916, there were rumours that a general mobilisation was planned. In response, the Miners’ Union discussed going on strike and refusing the call-up. There were calls within the Labour Movement for the Social Democrats to convene an extra con­gress to discuss what action to take. The Young Social Democrats wrote to the party executive requesting this. After several months without a re­ply, they tired of waiting and called a workers’ peace congress themselves. They invited all organisations that supported workers’ action against warmongers to attend.

At about the same time, an article published in Stormklockan, the paper of the Young Socialists, caused a major stir. Erik Hedén, one of the most re­spected Social Democratic journalists of the day, wrote under the heading “Time for a general strike. We either act now – or go to war!”5

The invitation to the workers’ peace congress and the article in Stormklockan drew criticism from the Social Democratic party executive. They threatened the organisers with expulsion from the party. A members’ meeting of the Stockholm branch was held to discuss the situation, attended by 600 peo­ple. On one side stood Branting and on the other Erik Hedén and Zeth Höglund. Hedén won a slight majority for his proposal that the meeting issue a statement regretting that the party executive had failed to call a peace congress and expressing sympathy for the Young Social Democrats’ initia­tive in doing so. The meeting also urged the party executive and the national secretariat to convene an extra congress without further ado.

The workers’ peace conference organised by the Young Social Democrats was held in Stockholm in March 1916. It was well attended, not only by its own supporters but also by local party branches, trade unions and temper­ance lodges. The 265 delegates represented organisations with a total of 40 000 members. A manifesto was adopted calling on the Labour Movement to respond to the plans for war with its own plans for mass extra-parlia­mentary actions. Two days after the congress ended, charges of treason were brought against Höglund, Hedén and Ivan Oljelund. The inclusion of Oljelund in these proceedings was remarkable as he had been the only delegate at the congress to oppose a general strike!

The trial was a farce. But lack of evidence did not prevent the court from sentencing the accused to imprisonment and the forfeiture of their civil rights. Once again, those who had fought for peace were forced to go to jail for their views. Zeth Höglund faced not only three years’ imprison­ment, but loss of his seat in Parliament. Protests poured in from at home and abroad. On appeal, Hedén was found not guilty, while Höglund’s and Oljelund’s prison sentences were reduced to 12 months and eight months respectively. While Höglund was in jail, Branting took the opportunity of sacking him as a full-time official for the party.

Russia: revolution stops war

In Russia, the world war immediately sparked off protests. In many parts of Russia, workers went on strike on mobilisation day. Both the Bolshevik and Menshevik Social Democratic6 deputies voted in the Duma (Russian parliament) against funding the war effort. The Bolsheviks also waged a campaign in factories and elsewhere, which led to the entire Bolshevik par­liamentary group being deported to Siberia. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks continued to fight against the war, and they strove to bring down the gov­ernment. They got widespread support.

The heavy cost of the war was felt throughout Russian society. As the war progressed, food became increasingly scarce. In early 1917, protests grew in strength and a number of strikes broke out. On  March 8 (February 28 un­der the old Russian calendar), the women of Petrograd took to the streets, demanding bread and peace. Women working at the city’s textile factories went on strike, carrying other groups of workers with them. Within a few days, the movement had led to a general strike.

On March 11, the Tsar ordered the military to open fire on demonstrators and 40 people were killed. The same evening, one of the city’s military garrisons mutinied in protest at the decision to attack the workers. The fol­lowing morning, the mutiny spread throughout the regiment. When other regiments were brought in to quell the uprising, they joined the mutineers.

As in the revolutionary period of 1905, Soviets (workers’ councils) were set up. The Soviets were both local and regional in character. Workers, soldiers, and peasants elected representatives to them. The movement spread across the country and the Tsar had no option but to resign. This became known as the February Revolution.

Before abdicating, the Tsar appointed Prince Lvov to head the government, the Council of Ministers. He was soon replaced by Alexander Kerensky. Neither was willing to end the war. Instead, a major offensive was launched in the summer of 1917. This triggered spontaneous uprisings against the government in Petrograd and Moscow, but as the revolts were confined to the cities, the government was able to suppress them. After that defeat, the movement lost impetus for a while. The power of the Soviets was weak­ened and the Bolshevik Party, which had been legalised at the time of the February revolution, was once against outlawed.

However, the movement soon regained strength. Peasants began to seize the property of landowners. Faith in the unelected provisional government diminished. Many began to place greater trust in the governing bodies they themselves built up. In August, there were 600 Soviets in the country, rep­resenting 23 million voters.7 By October there were 900 Soviets.8

Many regiments declared that they would no longer take orders from the government but would answer only to the Soviets. In practice, this meant that the revolution had been successfully completed as power now lay with the elected Soviets. When the Second Pan-Russian Congress of the Soviets was held on 5 November,9 the Bolsheviks were in a majority. Of the 650 delegates attending the congress, 390 supported the ‘Bolsheviki’.10

The storming and occupation of the Winter Palace (commonly referred to as the October Revolution) on the night from 6 to 7 November was not much of a storming at all. There was hardly any opposition.

More people died during the making of Eisenstein’s classic film about the revolution, October, than in the actual revolution. The fall of the Winter Palace merely swept away one of the vestiges of power of the old regime. When this was announced at the Second Congress, a decree was adopted transferring all power to the Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies.

After the October Revolution, the socialist government immediately began honouring its promises. It was well aware that attempts would be made to bring down the new regime, and believed that if peasants were given their land, workers were given control of their factories, oppressed nationalities were given self-determination, and everybody peace, the revolution would be better equipped to stave off counter-revolutionary attacks.

On November 28 1917, the Bolshevik-led government negotiated a truce along the entire Eastern Front, and in early December peace talks with Ger­many began in Brest-Litovsk. The main opposition parties, the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, argued strongly in favour of continuing the war. They justified this by referring to Russia’s obligations towards her old allies on the Western Front (Britain, France and others), and patriotism: Germany and the other Central Powers were occupying large areas of west­ern Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States.

Prior to the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had unanimously agreed that if the working class took control of Russia, all the warring parties were to be offered a just peace without any annexation of territory or payment of war damages. Should the imperialist powers refuse to accept this, the Bolsheviks would defend the socialist state while at the same time advocat­ing and supporting revolt against the imperialist powers. They argued that this line would most benefit the struggle for international socialism.

Most of the Bolshevik leaders continued to pursue this line after the October Revolution. However, when Germany refused to agree to a just peace, Lenin realised that the Russian army was no longer in a condition to continue the war. Soldiers, who were often peasants, hurried home to make sure they would not be left out when the Church’s and the landown­ers’ property was parcelled out. The land-reform decree had hastened the disintegration of the army.

As Lenin saw it, a separate peace with the German generals, even if it were achieved on extremely unfavourable terms, would hasten the socialist revo­lution in Germany and the rest of Europe. In particular, it would ensure that a valuable example was set: in the East, a socialist Soviet state in peace, and in the West, two imperialist blocs locked in bloody war.

There was, of course, a risk that an end to hostilities on the Eastern Front would make it easier for Germany to wage war on the Western Front, thus encouraging chauvinism in Germany. Stalin and Zinoviev, who supported Lenin’s call for an immediate peace, argued that the Russian revolution was worth saving even if such a move delayed the German revolution. Lenin was forced to dissociate himself openly and categorically from this line of thinking. He retorted that the German revolution was more important than the Russian, as a revolution in an advanced capitalist state would be of much greater benefit to the working class of the world.11

Trotsky took a position midway between Lenin and those that wanted to wage a revolutionary war. His position became known as “neither war nor peace”. He argued that the Russian soldiers should simply lay down their arms and leave the front; without the Soviet government signing a humiliat­ing peace agreement. This would show the workers of the world that Russia had peaceful intentions and was unwilling to sign an unjust pact. In fact, this policy was adopted by the Bolsheviks for a brief period. But when the German troops continued to advance eastwards despite the refusal of the Russian troops to fight, Trotsky sided with Lenin. The international Labour Movement, he thought, would understand that the Russian government had no alternative.

At a meeting of the Bolsheviks’ party executive, Lenin’s line was approved by the narrowest of margins. On 3 March, the government signed an agree­ment with Germany and the Central Powers on less favourable terms than those originally offered by the Germans. Russia was to pay war damages of 300 million gold roubles and was also to concede an area of land equivalent to a quarter of its pre-war territory. Southern Russia and Ukraine, both of which had also been drawn into the revolution and had active workers’ councils, were taken over by Germany.12

The Russian Bolsheviks showed that the congress decision of the Interna­tional could be followed. They carried out a socialist revolution and they brought the war to an end. However, the programme of the International was a programme for the international Labour Movement as a whole. The Bolsheviks alone could only partially implement it. Although they made peace, they were unable to push through the just peace they wanted. For that they needed the help of the other leaders of the Second International.

German resistance to the war

In Germany, resistance to the war was organised by left Social Democrats led by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring. At first, they were isolated and under severe pressure. When the first vote for war credits was to be taken in the German Parliament, Liebknecht op­posed it at a meeting of the party’s parliamentary group, but bowed to the party whip and voted in favour on 4 August, 1914. Subsequently, having been criticised by a group of industrial workers with leading positions in the Stuttgart party organisation he acknowledged that he had been “deeply shaken” and that “you are quite right in criticising me” for voting for cred­its. When the German government again asked the Reichstag for more money to finance the war effort, Karl Liebknecht was the only MP to vote against.13 In his speech to the Reichstag, he called for a swift peace without further territorial conquest.

In the spring of 1915, the German Left started a new newspaper, Die Internationale, in which Rosa Luxemburg wrote an editorial calling for the reconstruction of the International. The government immediately banned the newspaper, and charges of treason were brought against Luxemburg, Zetkin and Mehring. Rosa Luxemburg was already serving a prison sen­tence at the time, having been convicted before the war for inciting people to refuse the call-up. In December 1915, a score of Social Democratic MP’s voted against further war credits.

In January 1916, the supporters of Die Internationale founded a left faction in the German Social Democratic Party – the Spartacus League. On Mayday the Spartacists headed a demonstration of 10 000 in Berlin. Karl Liebknecht spoke on the theme ‘Down with the war. Down with the Government’. He was immediately arrested and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Widespread protests followed. In Berlin, 55 000 workers from the city’s ammunition factories came out on strike. In other places, too, strikes and demonstrations were organised. Thousands of workers were imprisoned or sent off to war, or both. Consequently, socialist propaganda reached the soldiers at the front as well.14

As the anti-war movement spread, the chauvinist leadership of the German Social Democratic Party, SPD, felt more and more threatened. So it expelled everybody who voiced any opposition. In April 1917 those expelled formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or USPD). Even old Social Democratic leaders such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, who had become more critical of the war as popular support for it faded, joined the USPD. Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s Spartacists operated as an independent revolutionary group within the USPD.

The leadership of the old SPD – a party that while diminishing in size was still larger than the USPD – was led by careerists such as Friedrich Ebert and Philip Scheidemann. Ebert was a monarchist and “detested the revolu­tion like the plague”. In his appeals to party officials he urged them to show “loyalty to the fatherland”. 15

The German war machine had been in steady decline since the United States entered the war. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to main­tain supply lines to both fronts. In July 1917, a majority in the German Re­ichstag called for an unconditional peace. The government manoeuvred the resolution off the agenda and the war continued. The Bolshevik Revolu­tion in November 1917 effectively led to the withdrawal of Russia from the War, but the defeat of Germany on the Western Front remained a certainty. By 1918, German troops were forced to retreat in large numbers, and the General Staff also called for peace negotiations. Kaiser Wilhelm’s Chancel­lor still refused.

Mutiny and uprising

A wave of unrest swept the country. At the end of October, sailors in Kiel mutinied when their ship was ordered out on a suicide mission. The sailors disarmed their officers and returned to port, where 580 of them were jailed. The response was immediate: 40 000 sailors and dock workers protested and a general strike developed. Soon, a council of workers and soldiers was in control of the entire city.16

From Kiel, the uprising spread to Hamburg, Lübeck, Munich and many more cities. As in Russia in 1905 and 1917, democratic councils of workers and soldiers emerged in the course of the struggle. On 7 November 1918, the ‘Council of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants’ in Munich announced that it had taken control. They appealed to the citizens of Munich: “We ask all of you to help, so that the inevitable transition may be effected quickly, eas­ily and peacefully. In this age of meaningless rampant murder, we abhor all bloodshed. Every human life should be sacred. Stay calm and help us build up the new world. Socialist fratricide will no more be seen in Bavaria. The working masses will be united once again on the revolutionary base now established. Long live the Bavarian Republic! Long live peace! Long live the creative work of all people!”17 On 9 November, the revolt reached the capital, Berlin. The Chancellor of the Reich announced his resignation and the abdication of the Kaiser. The Kaiser fled the country. Two days later Germany signed an armistice. Again, just like in Russia and in Sweden, it was the working class that stopped the warmongers.

However, unlike in Russia, the revolution was not carried through to its con­clusion. For another four years revolution and counter-revolution swayed back and forth. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested by Freikorps officers and murdered.18 Many years later it emerged that Schei­demann, via the SPD’s own secret police, ‘Section 14’, had put a bounty of 100 000 marks on their heads.19 The leaders that replaced them were not up to the task of leading the revolution to victory. The failure of the German Revolution meant that the road to another World War was open.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­___________________________________________________________________________

1 Zeth Höglund: Från Branting till Lenin, 1953

2 Documents 1907 -1916: Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International

3 Knut Bäckström: Arbetarrörelsen i Sverige, del 2, 1971

4 Zeth Höglund: Från Branting till Lenin, 1953

5 Ibid.

6 Since 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Party had been split into two factions – the

Bolsheviks (the word means majority) and the Mensheviks (minority). In 1912, they split permanently into two parties, both of which called themselves social democratic. As all social democratic parties were forbidden by the Czar, they appeared in the Duma under other names.

7 Leon Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution, 1988

8 Charles Bettelheim: Class Struggles in the USSR, 1976.

9 23 October under the old Russian calendar

10 In Bolshevism, Alan Woods give an exact breakdown of who supported the forming of

a Bolshevik government. 300 belonged to the Bolshevik Party. The remaining 90 either belonged to the left-wing of either the Social-Revolutionaries or the Mensheviks.

11 Alan Woods and Ted Grant: Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For, 2000

12 Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, 1973

13 Documents: 1907-1916: Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International

14 Introduction by Bo Gustafsson to the 1971 Swedish edition of Rosa Luxemburg’s book,

The Crisis of Social Democracy

15 ibid

16 Rob Sewell: Germany: 1918-1923, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, 1988

17 1918-19. Ein Lesebuch, 1979

18 Under the protection and command of the social democratic minister Noske, private

armies were set up, as well as special legions of unemployed officers and soldiers – the Freikorps – to crush the revolution.

19 Paul Frölich: Rosa Luxemburg, 1939

The global historical appeal of the Communist Manifesto

undergoes a fundamental revision and, as amended

by Kautsky, now reads:

proletarians of all countries,

unite in peace-time and cut each other’s throats in war!1

Rosa Luxemburg 1915

The World Wars

During the past decades, it has almost been taken for granted that la­bour leaders such as Tony Blair can be the closest allies to imperialist leaders such as George Bush.

In 1914, at the crucial moment when the First World War broke out, it came as a complete shock to almost everybody when the leadership of the dif­ferent national sections of the Second International sided with their own bourgeoisie, and helped pit worker against worker. Ever since, the anti-war movement has been forced to fight on two fronts at the same time – against war and against its own leaders. However, the betrayal in 1914 was no ac­cident. There were material causes to it.

The background

As tensions between the great powers increased at the beginning of the 20th century, the international Labour Movement re-doubled its effort to present a strategy for peace. At the International’s Stuttgart Congress in 1907, a new peace resolution was adopted unanimously and enthusiasti­cally. It was based on a proposal from the German Social Democrat Bebel, but given a tougher wording by Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the German Social Democrats. They also inserted an amendment that So­cial Democrats “should utilise the crisis created by the war to hasten the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.”2 And thereby end war once and for all. The resolution was re-adopted at the next congress in 1910.

The Labour Movement was not alone in hoping that the International would secure peace. In 1912, an Extraordinary Congress of the Interna­tional met in Basel, Switzerland. The non-socialist government of the can­ton expressed the hope that the Congress would succeed in creating peace. The Swiss Church placed the great Münster Cathedral at the disposal of the International. Some 545 delegates assembled.

Everyone, both those who spoke at the meeting and those who described their experiences afterwards – Viktor Adler from Austria, Peter Troelstra from Holland, Jean Jaurès from France, Fredrik Borgbjerg from Denmark and many others – talked about how the workers were no longer an un­enlightened mass without a will of their own. They would no longer let themselves be exploited by warmongers. If they were to die, it would be in defence of freedom, in a revolutionary uprising against militarism and capitalism.

Yet – within a matter of a week in 1914 – the whole strategy collapsed like a house of cards.

On June 28 1914, the Crown Prince and Princess of the Austrian empire were murdered by Serbian nationalists. Almost a month later, Austria gave Serbia an ultimatum, citing the shooting in Sarajevo. The Austrian terms were such that Serbia would be unable to consent to them all. War with Serbia meant a war with Russia, as the two countries were allies. This in turn would pull Russia’s traditional enemy and Austria’s ally Germany into the war. And so on, until all the major powers were at war.

Initially, the Social Democratic press in Germany remained faithful to the International’s ideals. They wrote that the ultimatum was obviously a provocation, and that Austria wanted war. The labour press denounced the move and declared that Social Democrats were totally opposed to Germany entering the war.

Then, on July 25, Austria declared war on Serbia, and a few days later Russia began to mobilise. In this atmosphere, the Executive Committee of the In­ternational held a meeting in Brussels on July 27 and 28 to discuss the Social Democratic position. This was when some in the International’s leadership began to waver.

The Austrian Social Democrat Viktor Adler declared that it was pointless for the Labour Movement to take any kind of action. He was worried that “we run the danger of destroying thirty years of work without any political result” if the Austrians organised against the war. And he wondered “is it not dangerous to encourage Serbia from inside our own country?” 3

Tragically, six days later the Serbian socialist MP Dragisa Lapčević, probably unaware of Adler’s speech, argued in Parliament against war credits and ex­pressed his confidence that the Serbian and Austrian Socialists would take a common stand against war.4

The two socialist MPs in the Serbian Parliament were the only Socialist deputies in belligerent countries, apart from Russian, to vote against war credits.

In early August, the German government sought the approval of the Re­ichstag for the issuing of war credits. The Social Democratic parliamentary group held a vote on what position to take. Of the 111 members of the Ger­man Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD), only fifteen were prepared to abide by the strategy of the International and vote against the war credits. A day later, these dissenters bowed to the ma­jority, and a unanimous parliamentary group subsequently voted in favour. After that vote there was no turning back, world war became inevitable.

When Lenin and LeonTrotsky, the other main leader of the Russian Revo­lution, read about this, they thought the newspaper that stated this was a forgery, published to provoke war. The turnaround had come as bolt from the blue to them, as it had to many others.

The Social Democrats in the Reichstag had not been duped into adopting a new stance on the war issue. The power game being played out in Europe was openly described in the White Book (official report) that the govern­ment presented to the Reichstag and to which the Social Democratic parlia­mentary group had full access. It showed that the German government had pushed Austria into presenting Serbia with an ultimatum. And they were fully aware that Austria’s conduct towards Serbia would lead to war. On the day the White Book was published, the German government also informed the Social Democratic parliamentary group that the German army was poised to march into Belgium. A country that obviously had nothing to do with the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince.

To the general public the German government presented its war of aggres­sion as a case of self-defence. The threat was Russian tyranny. The govern­ment claimed it had to protect German independence. Rosa Luxemburg was not surprised at this. Throughout history, she noted, governments had claimed they were waging war to protect their country. “This legend is as inextricably a part of the game of war as powder and lead. The game is old. Only that the Social Democratic Party could play it is new.” 5

France’s leading socialist and anti-militarist, Jean Jaurès, was murdered in Paris soon after returning home from the EC’s July meeting in Brussels. When the news came that the German Social Democrats had retreated from their position, the French and Belgian Social Democrats also voted to grant their respective government’s war credits. Eventually, almost all of Europe was involved, and the US eventually joined the fighting as well. The outbreak of the First World War spelled the end of the 2nd International.

Privileges

How could this have happened – so quickly and unexpectedly?

The carving up of the world into colonial empires during the decades leading up to the First World War led to a long period of relatively rapid economic growth in Europe. The Labour Movement was able to take ad­vantage of this. Political and social reforms were achieved through struggle. A layer of the working class raised its living standards, above all the more skilled and educated workers. Previously they had been in the forefront of the class struggle. For them the class struggle lost some of its sharpness, and they reduced their pressure on the leadership.

The organisations and publications of the Labour Movement grew strong during the economic upturn. The very success of the Labour Movement meant that it began to attract individuals from classes other than the work­ing class. Some genuinely wanted to further the emancipation of the work­ing class, but others just saw it as a means to further their own careers. Most party members were skilled workers and craftsmen. Slightly less than 15% of the members were unskilled workers. Almost 10% of the members of the German Social Democratic Party were self-employed.6 This gave the leadership even more leeway to pursue pro-capitalist policies.

However, the most important reason for the change in policies of the leadership was that the movement was soon in a position to offer some of its members employment and official posts. By 1914 the German Labour Movement employed 4010 officials, most of them on salaries considerably above the workers wages.7 In addition, the advent of parliamentarism gave the upper echelons of the Labour Movement access to a lifestyle very dif­ferent from that of an ordinary worker. The unelected officials together with the elected leadership made up the bureaucracy of the Labour Move­ment – a privileged caste that acted more and more independently of those they represented.

This was expressed ideologically in the attempts by Eduard Bernstein, a leading German social democrat, to revise Marxism. He was criticised for this by Karl Kautsky, the ideological leader of the German Social Demo­cratic Party and the Second International. For this Kautsky was internation­ally respected. When Rosa Luxemburg, who worked closely with Kautsky, attempted to point out that he was in fact quite timid when it came to the practical struggle, Lenin thought she was exaggerating. When the First World War broke out, Kautsky used his authority to stop the anti-war movement. While almost all of the leadership of the Second International had continued to pay lip service to Marxism, most of them had reduced Marxism to an empty shell.

When things came to a head, because of the outbreak of war, these lead­ers hesitated barely a moment before siding with the capitalists. These bureaucrats would have been placed in a difficult position if they opposed the war. Under the strategy developed by the International – transforming the anti-war struggle into a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole – they would quite likely have been accused of treason and imprisoned. There had been plenty of evidence of that in previous struggles. The Social Democratic leaders in Germany, Austria, France and many other countries were no longer prepared to expose themselves to such risks. Instead they abandoned the struggle.

In many countries, the Social Democratic leaders declared a party truce (the suspension of all party activities) and collaborated with royalist rulers and bourgeois governments. They pledged to put the class struggle on hold for the duration of the war. They may have been promised – or hoped to gain – reforms and a greater say in political affairs in exchange for siding with the government. However, deprivation and death was all workers got out of the war.

The International was paralysed by its own leaders. There were no con­gresses held where members could pass judgement on the policies of their leaders or remove them. All the resolutions that spelled out what the lead­ership should do where turned on their head by a leadership that had no democratic mandate to do so at all. The only mandate they received was from the bourgeoisie in their own country. The bourgeoisie and the media wasted no time in elevating the bureaucracy of the Labour Movement to heroes of the nation. The leadership lapped it all up. There was no way that the working class could rid of its old leadership and create a new leadership, in the course of the few days which the betrayal took.

Due to the betrayal, patriotism was able to celebrate triumphs when the war broke out in 1914. The normal pattern of life was disrupted and people gathered at mass meetings to demonstrate their support for the nation’s government. Many volunteered for service at the front, and people stood at the side of the road and cheered when the soldiers marched off.

The factory workers and farm labourers who sallied forth were not out to seize colonies, but a war naturally means that if you choose not to defend yourself you run the risk of your country being occupied by a hostile for­eign power. The working class in Germany had secured more extensive democratic rights than the workers of any other country, and had no wish to be exposed to a Tsarist dictatorship. French workers were of similar mind. They had no wish to be hounded by Prussian Junkers (the German landowning nobility). For a time, the forces unleashed at the outbreak of war wiped out internationalism.

Nevertheless, enthusiasm for the war was at most superficial. The ordinary soldiers’ view of the enemy was very different from that taken by the of­ficers. Stuck in trenches that were often no more than 50-100 metres from enemy lines, they soon realised that the soldiers in the opposing trenches were suffering in the same way as they were. A British soldier described the situation: “We hated their guts when they killed any of our friends; then we really did dislike them intensely. But otherwise we joked about them and I think they joked about us. And we thought, well, poor so-and-so’s, they’re in the same kind of muck as we are.”8

Another soldier, Andrew Todd, a telegrapher with the Royal Engineers, described in a letter home how a live-and-let-live attitude had developed at the front: “Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that the soldiers in both lines of trenches have become very ‘pally’ with each other. The trenches are only 60 yards9 apart at one place, and every morning about breakfast time one of the soldiers sticks a board in the air. As soon as this board goes up all firing ceases, and men from either side draw their water and rations. All through the breakfast hour, and so long as this board is up, silence reigns supreme, but whenever the board comes down the first unlucky devil who shows even so much as a hand gets a bullet through it.”10

On Christmas Eve 1914, many German soldiers stuck Christmas trees on top of the trenches. The entire German line was lit by candles placed on trees. At first, many British soldiers suspected it was a trick, but soon the celebrations turned into fraternising. Soldiers shouted Christmas greetings to one another across the divide, and the enemies sang Christmas carols to one another.

After a while, soldiers began leaving their trenches to gather together in no mans land. It was usually the Germans who took the initiative. This was probably because prior to the war the German Labour Movement had had a clearer internationalist ideology than its British counterpart.

An unofficial truce developed, particularly along the southern section of the Ypres Salient in Belgium, but also in other parts of the Western Front.11 In some places, the truce lasted until midnight on Christmas Day, while in others it lasted through to New Year’s Day.

“We shook hands, wished each other a Merry Xmas, and were soon conversing as if we had known each other for years. We were in front of their wire entanglements and surrounded by Germans – Fritz and I in the centre talking, and Fritz occasion­ally translating to his friends what I was saying. We stood inside the circle like street-corner orators. Soon most of our company (‘A’ Company), hearing that I and some others had gone out, fol­lowed us . (…) What a sight – little groups of Germans and Brit­ish extending almost the length of our front! Out in the darkness we could hear laughter and see lighted matches, a German light­ing a Scotchman’s cigarette and vice versa, exchanging cigarettes and souvenirs. Where they couldn’t talk the language they were making themselves understood by signs, and everyone seemed to be getting on nicely. Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!”12.

An important reason for the truce was that both sides wanted to collect and bury their dead, whose rotting corpses littered the land between the lines. In a few cases, they even held joint funeral services.

Perhaps the most astonishing instance was a soccer game played in the middle of no man’s land between the Bedfordshire Regiment and German soldiers. The Germans were leading 3-2 when the game had to be called off because the ball had been punctured by a barbed wire entanglement.

Such demonstrations of brotherhood were not at all to the liking of the of­ficers. Strict instructions were issued banning all further socialising with the enemy, and the following Christmas the officers ordered artillery bombard­ments to be stepped up to keep the soldiers in the trenches.13 The Christ­mas truce in 1914 showed that the patriotic hysteria which prevailed at that early stage could have been overcome had the Labour Movement’s leaders come out strongly against the war.

As they did not, four years of totally meaningless suffering and death en­sued. As the warring parties were equally matched in military terms, the Western Front was quickly locked in a war of attrition. The soldiers lay in muddy trenches, shooting at the enemy trenches opposite for month after month and year after year. From time to time, the generals sought to achieve a breakthrough by sending their men ‘over the top’, and they occa­sionally succeeded in shifting the front a few kilometres – at a terrible cost in human life. Two of the best-known battles were those at Verdun and at the Somme in 1916. The latter lasted for four months and the two sides lost a total of one million men.14

To break the deadlock, more and more divisions were brought up. By 1917, four million allies were ranged against two and a half million Germans on the Western Front. New weapons were introduced as well – gas, flame-throwers and tanks. But no decisive breakthrough could be achieved.

In all, an estimated eight and a half million people lost their lives as a direct result of military activity in the First World War. Some 21 million were­ wounded and seven million were reported captured or missing.

Countries	Total	Died in	Injured	Imprisoned	Total	Total
	mobilized	combat		or missing	affected	affected as
		and other				% of total mobilized
		war-related
		causes
Entente
powers
Russia	12 000 000	1 700 000	4 950 000	2 500 000	9 150 000	76.3
France	8 410 000	1 357 800	4 266 000	537 000	6 160 800	76.3
British	8 904 467	908 371	2 090 212	191 652	3 190 235	35.8
Empire
Italy	5 615 000	650 000	947 000	600 000	2 197 000	39.1
USA	4 355 000	126 000	234 300	4 500	364 800	8.2
Japan	800 000	300 907	3	1	210	0.2
Romania	750 000	335 706	120 000	80 000	535 706	71.4
Serbia	707 343	45 000	133 148	152 958	331 106	46.8
Belgium	267 000	13 716	44 686	34 659	93 061	34.9
Greece	230 000	5 000	21 000	1 000	17 000	11.7
Portugal	100 000	7 222	13 751	12 318	33 291	33.3
Montenegro	50 000	3 000	10 000	7 000	20 000	40.0
Total	42 188 810	5 152 115	12 831 004	4 121 090	22 104 209	52.3
Central
powers
Germany	11 000 000	1 773 700	4 216 058	1 152 800	7 142 558	64.9
Austria-	7 800 000	1 200 000	3 620 000	2 200 000	7 020 000	90.0
Hungary
Turkey	2 850 000	325 000	400 000	250 000	975 000	34.2
Bulgaria	1 200 000	87 500	152 390	27 029	266 919	22.2
Total	22 850 000	3 386 200	8 388 448	3 629 829	15 404 477	67.4
All	65 038 810	8 538 315	21 219 452	7 750 919	37 508 686	57.6
Source: www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWdeaths.htm

The treachery of the Social Democratic leaders in 1914 was a turning point for the international Labour Movement, which divides thereafter into two distinct ideological tendencies – reformism and revolutionary Marxism. The present leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party claims that the break in the international Labour Movement between revolutionaries and reformists occurred in 1917, because of the “undemocratic” Russian Revo­lution. This assertion does not correspond to the facts. The Second Interna­tional split because many of its leaders supported the butchery of the First World War and others continued to stand for the policies democratically decided upon in congress after congress. The Russian Revolution was simply the fulfilment of plans drawn up by the International and its organisations.

__________________________________________________________________________________

1 Rosa Luxemburg: Rebuilding the International, 1915

2 V. I.Lenin: The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, 1907

3 Documents: 1907-1916: Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International

4 ibid

5 Rosa Luxemburg: The Crisis of Social Democracy, 1916

6 Gregory Zinoviev: The Social roots of the Split, 1916

7 ibid

8 Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton: Christmas Truce 23, 1984, quoted in Jennifer

Rosenberg: Peace in No Man’s Land, Christmas 1914 (http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa122100a.htm)

9 Approximately fifty-five metres

10Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton: Christmas Truce 23, 1984, quoted in Jennifer

Rosenberg: Peace in No Man’s Land, Christmas 1914

(http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa122100a.htm)

11 www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm

12 Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton: Christmas Truce 23

13 www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm

14 Bra Böckers lexikon