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by Joe Hillshoist » Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:10 pm
by Nordic » Mon Jun 20, 2011 12:05 am
by blanc » Mon Jun 20, 2011 4:02 am
by Joe Hillshoist » Mon Jun 20, 2011 5:00 am
by vanlose kid » Mon Jun 20, 2011 5:59 am
Joe Hillshoist wrote:The trouble with non state situations is dealing with the psycopaths.
Most people are cool and don't really need the state, but ... trouble is a state concentrates power so it offers a career path to psychos.
The truth is if there were easy answers to all this someone would have figured them out a long time ago.
by vanlose kid » Mon Jun 20, 2011 4:01 pm
Nordic wrote:well vl kid, that's all fine and dandy, and i can't disagree with you as far as you go, but you don't go far enough.
because if you tear down the pyramid, they will jusyt build it again. and they'll build it in such a way that you'll have a far smaller chance of ever tearing it down again
indeed that is what we are witnessing right now. after populist-based movements from the last 100 yearss or so, post-monarchy, post-colonial, post communist, we're now entering a post-democracy, post-unions, post civil-rights era with a survaillance capability that any monarch of old could never have dreamed of.
so let me rephrase the question --
if you tear down the pyramid, what actions do you take to ensure that they don't simply rebuild it?
because they will. if there's any way they can.
The war in Europe: What happened?
- James Heartfield
Submitted by Django on Jun 19 2011 12:09
James Heartfield looks back at the events of the second world war in Europe, concluding that the motivation of the allied powers was not to save Europe from fascism or the Jews from genocide, but to protect their economic interests.
[snip]
7. The First World War and The twenty-years crisis
Inter-imperialist rivalries broke out into World War in 1914. Contest over the Balkans was the immediate cause. German demands for colonies challenged the British and French Empires. Allied with Austria and Turkey, Germany was beset by British and French forces contesting its invasion of Belgium to the West, and their Imperial Russian allies to the East. Troops were armed with rifles and machine guns, but not yet motorised, giving rise to the labour-intensive and barbaric form of trench warfare. Armistice in 1918 was followed by a punitive peace of financial reparations and the loss of German territory in Alsace-Lorraine to France in the South and to Poland to the East. The Austrian and Turkish Empires were broken up. A string of smaller states in the East were newly recognised in the Treaty of Versailles, as a buffer zone to German expansion, but proved to be a source of continual instability, due to their dependence on more powerful sponsors.
Though one late entrant to the imperialist club, Germany, had been black-balled, another, America, emerged as the guarantor of economic stability, extending the international credit that sustained post war recovery, under Charles Dawes' Plan (the third late entrant, Japan, was granted status in the carve-up of China, but was refused its claim to racial equality with the white nations). But the withdrawal of this US credit after the stock market on Wall Street crashed in 1929 once again threw Europe into turmoil. German reparations were a source of conflict with France, and a contest for influence in Eastern Europe with Britain showed that the post-war stabilisation had only put the problem of re-dividing the world on hold.
Behind the immediate clash between Germany and France and Britain lay a more profound conflict between Britain and the United States. The declining cohesion of the British Empire threatened world stability, while the United States, having emerged as the dominant economic power behind the world trading system was not yet ready to assume the role of world policeman. The expansion of US capitalism demanded the opening up of the remaining European empires to US trade. More immediately, its expansion in the Far East was constraining Japanese imperialism.
[snip]
Socialist parties in continental Europe took advantage of the repeal of anti-labour legislation to grow rapidly into mass movements. In Britain trade union leaders (supported by non-conformist Establishment radicals) formed the Labour Party. And though it happened the other way around on the continent, union leaders nevertheless became the organisational ballast to the Socialist parties. Social reform tied these Socialists to the fortunes of the nation state, through innumerable links, from local government representation to seats on social insurance schemes. Though 'working men have no country' (Marx and Engels, 1998: 58), the socialist parties geared their policies to national parliaments, just as the unions geared their claims to specific industries or workplaces. National and sectional divisions were sown in the working class, and a spirit of moderation dominated the more that working people were encouraged to identify with their nation, and their industry. Though a revolutionary left existed in all the socialist parties, only in Russia, where the ruling class was too weak to make any concessions, did the revolutionaries win out over the reformists.
[snip]
The outbreak of war in 1914 demonstrated the limitations of the national road to socialism. Socialist deputies and MPs in the national assemblies voted for war, effectively sending their own supporters to kill one another in defence of their respective nations. Both Britain and France introduced conscription.
WAR MOBILISATION AND DEAD 1914-19 (Kennedy, 1988: 354; Morris, 1990:174)
A)Mobilization
B)War dead
British Empire
a)9 500 000
b)947 000
French Empire
a)8 200 000
b)1 400 000
Germany
a)13 250 000
b)1 800 000
Austria-Hungary
a)9 000 000
b)1 200 000
Russia
a)13 000 000
b)1 700 000
USA
a)2 600 000
b)116 000
Italy
a)5 600 000
b)650 000
Other Allies*
a)40 700 000
Serbia
b)48 000
* Serbia, Greece, Belgium. Portugal, Bulgaria
War production consumed 76 per cent of all industrial labour in Russia and 64 per cent in Italy. German agricultural output fell by 50-70 per cent, Russian by 50 per cent, French by 40-50 per cent. Germany was the first to introduce rationing. In England food prices rose by 70 per cent, while wages rose only 18 per cent; in France food prices rose 74 per cent, wages by 30 per cent; in Italy food prices rose 84 per cent, wages 38 per cent.
[snip]
The European-wide wave of protest and rebellion in 1919-21 indicated that a substantial minority of the working class had emerged from the war rejecting the leadership of the ruling classes and of the Social Democrats. Their intellectual leap was given organisational form in a new International of Communist Parties that saw Soviet Russia as their example. The Communists gathered the militant minority from the Socialist movement.
[snip]
Before the First World War, social reaction had been gathering pace in response to the emergence of the working class as a force in history. In 1911 Winston Churchill anchored the warship Antrim in the Mersey ready to fire upon strikebound Liverpool (Ponting, 1994: 98-9). Elites had tried to re-direct the pressure for change towards the Empire, and finally into the Great War itself. But the failure to discipline the working class by enlisting them showed that the war had failed to resolve the underlying conflict between the classes.
[snip]
In Germany the 'Socialist' Ebert set the paramilitary Freikorps on his Communist rivals, and had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknicht killed along with hundreds of supporters of the Spartakusbund in January 1919 (Frölich, 1972: 297-301). In Ireland, auxiliaries known as the 'Black-and-Tans' were recruited to back up the Royal Irish Constabulary against nationalist rebels. 'When we begin to act we must act like a sledgehammer, so as to cause bewilderment and consternation among the people of southern Ireland,' said Churchill (Ponting, 1994: 264).
[snip]
Anti-Semitism was an essential part of the European reaction. In fact racism of all kinds was ubiquitous amongst pre-war elites. Reactionaries instinctively characterised their class enemies as a race apart, finding it easier to demonise radicals as Jews or some other foreign intruder, than face up to their lack of support amongst their own populations. The US immigration act of 1924 aimed to keep the country 'Nordic', and 24 states passed 'Eugenic' sterilisation laws (Kevles, 1999). Churchill, too, advocated the sterilisation of 100 000 'mental degenerates' (Ponting, 1994: 102). In 1905, after a decade of anti-Jewish agitation, the 1905 Aliens Act had been passed in Britain, restricting entry (Winder, 2004: 4). Anti-Semitic laws and attacks on Jews were common in Hungary, and after Pilsudski's death in 1935, in Poland. It was Germany's anti-Jewish laws, however, that were the most barbaric: 'National Socialism is the first Anti-Semitic movement to advocate the complete destruction of the Jews', Franz Neumann deduced just from the racial purity laws of 1933 (Neumann, 1966: 111). The laws created a 'legal ghetto', with Jews and other non-Aryans made subjects, but not citizens, their property seized, their access to the Civil Service and professions barred, and sexual relations with Aryans forbidden (Neumann, 1966: 115). Anti-Semitism was a fantastic re-imagining of the threat to the German middle classes. The Jews stood for everything they hated: the East, the burgeoning working classes (100 000 Jews from Poland had migrated to Germany after the war), Bolshevism and also high finance.
[snip]
The Nazi Government made the 1 May a national holiday in 1933, and trade union leaders marched alongside national socialists. The following day their offices were occupied, and on 12 May 1933, all their property attached to the public prosecutors office in Berlin, with Nazi labour leader Robert Ley as trustee (Neumann, 1966: 414). The German Labour Front substituted itself for the unions, but as an organisation that promoted Nazi ideals to workers rather than one that represented their interests. Compulsory Labour Service (Arbeitsdienst) and Compulsory Agricultural Service (Landhilfe, the 'most feared') were introduced, and war industries were working 70 hours a week by 1936, when workers were pledged to secrecy under threat of the death penalty in the event of 'treason' (ICC, Vol. III, No 1, January 1937: 22). In Italy, under the Vidoni Palace agreement of 1925 the General Federation of Industry granted sole negotiating rights to the fascist unions, effectively outlawing independent trade unions (Guerin, 1973: 180).
The militarisation of labour was not restricted to the Fascist dictatorships, though. In France decree laws increased hours in the armament industries to 60 a week (Clinton, 2002: 73) - output increases that would later feed the German military. In the US four million unemployed were organised in the Civil Works Administration in 1934, a further three million in the Works Progress Administration the following year, and 2 500 000 men aged 19-25 in the Civil Conservation Corps (Mattick, 1978: 132). These latter were camps in the woods, like the South Mountain Reservation, in New Jersey, where Captain Tobin had to call in the park police to expel mutineers in 1935 (ICC, No 6, March 1935:. Where Britain, France and America differed from Italy and Germany was that instead of dismantling the trade unions, they had succeeded in recruiting their leaders as quasi-official supervisors. In the US, for example, the American Federation of Labour, which had reduced from four to 2.5 million members between 1920 and 1932, was boosted by official recognition as the house union of the National Relief Association.
[snip]
Mysticism, charismatic leadership - 'decisionism', and intuition all took precedence over rational norms in law and government - often in ways that seem like they were inimical to the creation of a secure business environment. Though more extreme in the German case, such features were hardly unknown elsewhere. 'In the election of Roosevelt was not revealed so much the will of the masses to activity', thought one commentator, 'but rather the instinctive recognition of their present impotence, which seeks after the strong man' (ICC, Vol. III, No 1, January 1937: 3). Certainly Roosevelt demanded from congress 'a broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency' (quoted in Mattick, 1978: 130), and tried to pack the supreme court when it voted down his National Industrial Relations Act. Franz Neumann argued that corporate capitalism made abstract law problematic: 'In a monopolistically organized system the general law cannot be supreme', because the state is acting against one corporation, not adjudicating between many interests (Neumann, 1996: 126). But it was of course unlikely that the suspension of general law would work in the interests of the masses.
[snip]
Post war stabilisation had the effect of tying the Socialist parties closer to the state. In power, their authoritarian instincts and social conservatism were on display. Before the 'Anschluss' uniting Austria and Germany, in Red Vienna 'Marxist councillors offered a "social contract" with parents … offering assistance in return for their commitment to responsible parenting', but where this was lacking 'social workers were on hand to remove children to the municipal child observation centres' (Mazower, 1998: 90). In Belgium, Workers Party leader Henrik de Man's 'Plan of Works' caused a stir across the Socialist Parties for its strident economic nationalism, and later de Man would embrace Nazism as 'the German form of socialism' (Mazower, 1998: 138). In France the 'Popular Front' government enjoyed the support of the Communists for its denunciations of the top '200 families' while the Socialist president assured critics that the economy remained capitalistic (ICC, July 1936, Vol.2 No. 8: 4). Austerity, not prosperity, though was what the Socialists had to offer - 'more apartments were obtained by Nazi Aryanization policies in the Austrian capital in three years than had been built by the Social Democrats in the 1920s' (Mazower, 1998: 101).
[snip]
Even in the face of savage repression German workers did on occasions react against Nazi policies. Between February 1936 and July 1937 the government recorded 197 strikes. Ordinary Germans protested vehemently at the euthansia programme against the mentally ill and disabled, and succeeded in stopping the policy. When their Jewish husbands were imprisoned, German women massed in Berlin in protests over three days, and won the release of 6000 men (Goldhagen, 1997: 118-9). Daniel Goldhagen rejects the explanation for German acquiescence to the holocaust, the argument that they were uniquely obedient to the state, pointing out that these 'were the same people, Germans, who had battled in the streets of Weimar in defiance of existing state authority' (Goldhagen, 1997: 381-2). But obedience was the result of the conflicts of the twenties: the left had been crushed, and the Nazis were now the state authority (and even that required an internal massacre of Nazi militants of the SA in the 'night of the long knives').
[snip]
In 1940 JM Keynes told Duff Cooper that Nazi economic strategist Walther Funk's plan was 'excellent and just what we ourselves ought to be thinking of doing' (Maclaine, 1979: 149). Between 1932 and 1938 state spending on arms rose from £100m to £800m, 'the greatest public works programme ever' (Economist, 22 April 1939), and an attempt to boost a moribund British economy. Indebtedness followed, particularly to the USA. Another way of arresting decline was to lock the colonies into a 'Sterling Area', making Britain dependent on trade with its colonies.
Official history sees Britain betrayed by the (Tory) appeasers, and rescued by a combination of Winston Churchill's patriotism and Labour's anti-fascists. Revisionists have tried to show that appeasement was a necessary breathing space to build up the military means to defeat Hitler. But the interaction between appeasement and confrontation arises out of the needs of capitalist development.
Like much of the European ruling class, British leaders sympathised with Hitler's goal of crushing working class militancy, both in Germany and elsewhere. That was what Churchill admired in Mussolini and Hitler. But where German territorial expansion threatened British markets in Europe, and territory in the colonies, they opposed it. In fact they welcomed conflict as a means to eliminate a rival. 'The opportunity is being taken to replace Germany in markets into which she has crept by methods often closely related to the unscrupulous and unfair practices now exhibited in the more deathly struggle' (BBC Journal, April 1940).
[snip]
Between the wars, America was already the guarantor of the world financial system, but its political reach was limited, primarily by the European imperial system. As the most rapidly growing economy, America wanted to break into the colonies through its 'Open Door' free trade policy, and was especially concerned to secure raw materials in the colonised areas (Kolko, 1984: 201-6). The Atlantic Charter between Churchill and Roosevelt of July 1941 contained proposed 'access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity'. American surplus capital, loaned to Europe was already making a nonsense of the policy of isolation. Diplomatically, America fell behind British policy in Europe, first supporting appeasement, then confrontation with the Axis. The fact that Nazi protectionism had reduced the German share of US exports from 8.4 to 3.4 billion between 1933 and 1938, as those to Britain helped Roosevelt to decide which side to support (Pauwels, 2002: 57). Even then Senator Harry S. Truman said of the German invasion of the USSR, 'if we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides' (Pauwels, 2002: 64). In the end, though, it was Germany that brought matters to a head, declaring war on the US on 11 December 1941, four days after Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbour.
Roosevelt had succeeded in persuading Congress to vote first one billion, then three billion dollars for defence after the German offensive of 1940 (Monnet, 1978: 151). In December, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to extend loans and armaments to Britain as 'lend-lease' to support the war effort. 'These orders are an important factor in United States economic activity in general, and in developing the aircraft industry in particular,' Roosevelt said, adding 'they mean prosperity as well as security' (Monnet, 1978: 135). Absorbing America's excess capacity was an essential means of raising her out of the persisting recession, with unemployment climbing back up to ten million in 1937 (Mattick: 1978: 139). US exports to Britain rose from $505 million in 1939 to $5.2 billion in 1944 (Pauwels, 2002: 54). Until 1944, the Americans remained preoccupied primarily with defeating Japan.
[snip]
Particularly demoralising for Hitler was Churchill's 'swift and wholehearted declaration of support for the Soviet Union' on the day of the invasion (Maclaine, 1979: 196). Perhaps ironically, he considered Britain and America making common cause with the Soviet Union a betrayal of the European race. But the Eastern campaign was a useful diversion from the absence of a West European front from 1940-44. Goebbels protested that the English 'intended from the very beginning to have other countries and peoples do their fighting for them'. In October 1941, America extended lend-lease to the USSR. 'With our country not yet fully engaged in hostilities', recalled O.S.S. officer H Stuart Hughes, 'the overriding, the agonizing concern in Washington was to keep the Soviet Union fighting' (Hughes, 1990: 138). But still the early years of success in the East lent the Nazi cause a great deal of forward momentum. Over time, though, the Russian untermenschen's fightback would become the single most debilitating influence on Germany.
The Soviet Union's left-wing allies in the European Communist Parties were first relieved and then invigorated by the policy shift from the unpopular position of opposing imperialist war (and worse still of defending Molotov-Ribbentrop), to joining the People's War against Fascism. But in time the sacrifices involved in yet another alliance with one imperialist faction against another would have to be made, even if they were never fully understood.
[snip]
While allied and axis armies avoided each other in Europe, European civilians were put into the frontline of aerial bombardment. First practised by the RAF in Iraq in the 1920s, the full horrors of aerial bombardment were popularised by the Luftwaffe attacks on Guernica in the Spanish Republic. In 1939, the air war made total war into a reality.
In the Blitz 29 890 Londoners were killed outright, with a further 50 000 seriously injured; 116 000 houses were destroyed outright, and 288 000 badly damaged. A third of the Port of London Authority’s warehouses were destroyed (Widgery, 1991: 34) ‘Finsbury’s huge pre-war industrial workforce never recovered from the bombing of its factories and workshops’ and the City of London lost 40 per cent of its industrial workers – part of the reason that today both are non-industrial districts (Stephen Inwood, 1998: 809-10). The slogan 'London can take it' was in poor taste. None the less, British victory in the air war in the autumn of 1940 did take the pressure off.
British marshalls, Arthur Tedder and Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris developed the policy of aerial bombardment to break the enemy's will. Ernest Mandel suggests that 'Churchill plumped for it as a substitute for a rapid opening of a second front in France' (Mandel, 1986: 135). 'The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive', said Harris in 1943, 'should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers and the disruption of civilised community life throughout Germany'. But the Air Ministry preferred to maintain a public disavowal of the policy, while endorsing it in private (McLaine, 1979: 161). In 1942 45 732 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Germany, with just four per cent of them aimed at industrial targets or ports. Incendiary attacks were made on Cologne, Hamburg, and then Dresden, where 135 000 were killed (Mandel, 1986: 135). The effect of these bombings was to atomise German society, enhancing the authority of the Nazi state rather than diminishing it. Coming after the political defeat of the opposition by the Nazis, the physical destruction of industrial cities by Bomber Command would contribute to the subjugation of the German working class in the post war era.
[snip]
The pressure that the decaying Axis system was putting on Europe provoked opposition, particularly the forced labour exacted by Nazi plenipotentiary-general for labour mobilization Fritz Saukel (Mazower, 1998: 159). It was not of course only that occupation was becoming more onerous, or that the Resistance was becoming more determined, Allied successes in the war encouraged more people to resist. The political form that the domination of capital took over the people of Europe was one of occupation, so naturally enough, their opposition to capital took the form of a struggle for national liberation. The different tempos and characters of the resistance (driven by organised labour in Holland, by the peasantry in Greece) arose in the first instance from the different roles these countries played in the division of labour in Nazi Europe, as sources of food, manufactured goods or workers. The way that these conflicts worked themselves out would be governed also by the pre-existing traditions, whether of reformist trade unionism or rural brigandage...
According to Henri Michel, Britain lost its early influence with the resistance as the war progressed: 'She proposed to the Resistance that Europe should revert to its pre-war shape, which the Resistance no longer wanted … it was waging a civil war as well as a war of liberation'. In Italy, and more so in Greece, Churchill 'emerged as an opponent of the Resistance … defending a political and social system which it had been their object to destroy' (Michel, 1975: 52). Britain's official war historian M.R.D. Foot is at pains to say that 'character not [social] class made people resisters, or collaborators, or would be neutrals', but on the contrary, it was by and large the ruling classes who collaborated, and the working classes who resisted (Foot, 1976: 11). In Holland, a German Military Decree of 29 April 1943 that former Dutch soldiers would be sent to the Reich as labourers provoked a wave of strikes centred on the industrial town of Hengelo, and rapidly spreading to the mining district of Limburg and the Philips works in Eindhoven. It took ten days, and summary executions, as happened at Philips, to restore order. Pointedly, the London-exiled Dutch Prime Minister Gerbrandy broadcast from the BBC on 19 May warning 'against revolt at too early a stage', and encouraging passive resistance (Hæstrup, 1978: 104-5). In 1944, the allies again proved less than enthusiastic about strikes planned by Central Dutch Resistance Council - this time to coincide with the invasion. In retrospect, British commander at Arnhem R.E. Urquhart admitted that an unwillingness to cooperate with the Resistance contributed to major setbacks in the winter of 1944-5 (Hæstrup, 1978: 107) From the perspective of the British military historian Foot, the resistance largely existed to serve the needs of the Allies: information gathering, aiding escaping officers, and, insofar as it engaged in the economic sphere, this was just 'sabotage', not insurrection (Foot, 1976). Frictions between the Resistance and the British were on show because of the extent of the Special Operations Executive's initial links. In fact all three of the allies clashed with the expectations that were raised in the Resistance and Partisan movement.
[snip]
Allied thinking on Italy was shaped by the problem of the Greek Resistance Army ELAS (Macmillan, 1984: 657). ELAS was initiated by Aris Velouchtis, in the face of scepticism from his fellow Communist Party (EAM) members, as a way of organising the Greek klephtic brigands who were busy raiding rural towns, as a force against the German occupation late in 1941 (Eudes, 1972: 10-14). ELAS's successes were rapid, and created liberated zones in the countryside, adding to the strikes against forced labour in the cities in 1943 (Eudes, 1972: 33-40). Britain sent a youthful Captain Chris Woodhouse into Greece in the hopes of building up alternative 'national' bands, but he found that ELAS' were in control, 'even motor roads were mended and used by EAM-ELAS' (Woodhouse, quoted in Tsoucalas, 1969: 61).
Arming ELAS, though, was a continuing problem for the SOE. Macmillan was warned by the nationalist politician George Papandreou, that 'in our desire to attack the Germans we had aroused and armed most dangerous Communist forces in Greece itself' (Macmillan, 1984: 546). By September 1943, the Italian army was surrendering its arms and supplies to an ELAS force of 50,000, giving it absolute advantage over its smaller rival liberation forces (Tsoucalas, 1969: 67). In April 1944 the Greek Army stationed in Cairo mutinied. They were accused by Churchill of harbouring 'an unworthy fear of being sent to the front', but in fact they were demanding to be sent into battle to help free their country. British hostility to the army's demands were made clear by Sir Reginald Leeper, British Ambassador to the Greek government in exile, who telegraphed the foreign office that 'what is happening here among the Greeks is nothing less than a revolution' (Eudes, 1972: 123). Churchill had the 20,000 men rounded up and held in concentration camps in Libya and Eritrea - 'let hunger play its part', he cabled Leeper (Tsoucalas, 1969: 73)...
The conditions were prepared for the British Expeditionary Force under General Scobie to enter Greece. 'Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress', read Churchill's orders of 5 December 1944 (Tsoucalas, 1969: 85). Three days later, he added 'the clear objective is the defeat of the E.A.M.' - not the German or Italian armies, which had already been defeated. And making clear his desire to inflict a physical defeat, Churchill added 'the ending of the fighting is subsidiary to this'. (Tsoucalas, 1969: 88). On the same day, in the House of Commons, an opposition amendment regretted that the King’s speech of 29 November 'contains no assurance that H.M. Forces will not be used to disarm the friends of democracy in Greece and other parts of Europe, or to suppress popular movements which have variously assisted in the defeat of the enemy and upon whose success we must rely for future friendly cooperation in Europe' Churchill replied that valorous action against the Germans did not entitle the popular movements to become masters of their countries, adding, guiltily: 'Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a tommy-gun.' (Macmillan, 1984: 599). The British held Athens, bombing working class districts from the air and freeing pro-Nazi collaborators to fire on demonstrators, only because the ELAS fighters were kept out of the city by the Communist Party leadership. Field Marshall Alexander complained of a 'stubborn core of resistance', Athenians held up banners reading 'the Germans are back' (Eudes, 1972: 214, 190).
[snip]
Tito's forces were the most remarkable of all the partisan armies, a quarter of a million in 1943, who inflicted extensive casualties on the German military. British ambitions in the Balkans were damaged by their support for Mihailovic. The pressure for change built up in the SOE, and eventually, Churchill intervened sending the aristocratic Tory MP Fitzroy Maclean to Yugoslavia to support Tito. Maclean objected that Tito would turn Yugoslavia communist, to which Churchill asked 'Are you going to live there?' 'No.' 'Neither am I.' (Davidson, 1981: 132). Tito's patriots proved to be a law unto themselves, not just for the British, but for the Soviets, too. Only in Yugoslavia did the partisans wholly succeed in freeing themselves, and Tito's post-war Communist regime proved to be a headache for Stalin. German hostility towards Yugoslavia, as the one country in Eastern Europe that defeated them persisted beyond the downfall of Nazism.
[snip]
The D-Day landings of 6 June 1944 opened the Second Front in Normandy. The impending liberation of the occupied powers by the United States caused difficulties for the ruling elites in those countries compromised by collaboration. According to a waspish De Gaulle, 'In 1944, the Americans cared no more about liberating France than did the Russians about liberating Poland' (Revel, 2004). For viable capitalist states to be recreated, it was necessary for the elites to lay claim to the efforts of the Resistance. M.R.D. Foot points out the curiosity that 'the local communist parties in western Europe, though much more numerous and sophisticated than their Greek opposite numbers, made no effective move towards seizing power' (Foot, 1976: 70). Instead they let the fruit of their efforts fall into the hands of ruling classes who had largely collaborated with the Nazis. Foot, downplaying the practical contribution of the Resistance, insisted on its moral importance: 'It gave back to the people in the occupied countries the self-respect they lost in the moment of the occupation' (Foot, 1976: 319). Taking advantage of the political hiatus, the Allies simply moved in to restore the elites to power. When Italian partisans arrived to arrest Fiat director and collaborator Vittorio Valletta, they found an English officer in his villa, waiting to present a safe conduct pass on his behalf (Ginsborg, 1990: 23).
[snip]
Though national elites were disgraced by their collaboration, the national idea was saved by the partisans: 'the legitimacy of post-war regimes and governments essentially resisted on their resistance record', according to Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 164). General De Gaulle's claim that 'eternal France' had never been defeated is essentially untrue. France had been defeated. More than that, its ruling elite had been craven in defeat, preferring Hitler to Blum (Clinton, 2002: 65). But the efforts of the French resistance, and principally of the militant working class minority, saved France's honour. While the ruling class was indifferent to national sovereignty, Stalinism remained wedded to one country, even to the point of putting off socialism to a later date. The moral deficit of the European national ruling elites was a persistent problem, and one that predisposed them to transnational institutions after the war.
[snip]
5. Restoring the Empires
Describing a parade of Free French troops in Tunis on 20 May 1943, Macmillan qualifies his admiration 'the great majority of the French were of course natives’ (Macmillan, 1984: 89). The Socialists in the French Resistance put off the moment of colonial freedom to a future date, proposing 'the gradual emancipation of the native peoples'. But even this cautious promise was too much for the patriotic Communists, who struck it out of the Common Resistance Programme on the grounds that it would exclude the right (Clinton, 2002: 155). Amongst the natives fighting to liberate France were the future Algerian resistance leader Ahmed Ben Bella, who was awarded the Military Medal by General de Gaulle in person, and a Martinican medic, Frantz Fanon, attached to the Sixth Regiment Tirailleurs Sénégalais (6RTS). The 6RTS, who were much feared by the Germans for their tenacity in close quarter fighting, took part in the liberation of France, but were denied 'the military glory of crossing the Rhine into Germany' (Macey, 2000: 100). On 12 April 1945, Fanon concluded that he had joined up 'to defend an obsolete ideal' (Macey, 2000: 103). On 8 May, as Paris celebrated its liberation, crowds came out in Algiers adding banners for their own independence. French troops opened fire on the crowd, inaugurating five days of skirmishes that left 40 000 Algerians dead (Macey, 2000: 206). The Free French fought most of their war from the colonies with colonial troops, but Tunisia, Algeria, Senegal, Côte D'Ivoire and the others had to wait another twenty years for their independence.
The legal basis of the restoration of the European Empires was contained in an agreement made at Yalta, at the time of the Declaration on Liberated Europe. Churchill succeeded in persuading the Americans to exclude British and other Allies territories from the United Nations Trusteeship system, which would have seen them more rapidly opened up to US trade (Pijl, 1984: 135). This moderation of the Open Door policy was a sign that the US, in accepting the role of World Policeman, was also prepared to cooperate with the former colonial powers where they were able to restore order. At the same time, the moral basis of Empire, racial supremacy, was irreparably damaged by the association with Nazism. 'It seems to me that our own outlook on Colonial Policy is being recast', wrote Lord Hailey of the British Colonial Office, arguing that the Empire must stand on its promise of material betterment to subject peoples (Wolton, 2000, 133).
6. War Guilt
In 1940 the Ministry of Information launched an Anger Campaign to instil 'personal anger… against the German people and Germany', because the British were 'harbouring little sense of real personal animus against the average German' (Maclaine, 1979: 143). Sir Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office gave a series of Radio Broadcasts (later collated into his Black Book) listing German wickedness over the ages, with the lesson that they were an intrinsically wicked people. The MOI's surveys suggested that British public were not so sure, some were even concerned that the 'effect of Vanittartism might eventually hamper an equitable solution after the war' (Maclaine, 1979: 156). In America, it was Treasury Secretary J Henry Morgenthau who put up the strongest argument for punishing Germany in a proposal to the Quebec Conference in September 1944 that became known as the Morgenthau plan for reducing the country to pastoralism by destroying its industry. A paper on the 'German Character' by Brigadier W.E. van Cutsem distributed to all personnel in the British Occupation Zone warned that 'Germans are not divided into good and bad Germans', that 'the sadistic trait is not peculiar to the Nazis' and that 'they exult death rather than life' (Meehan, 2001: 55). The American equivalent 'occupation booklet' told GIs that 'before the German people can learn how to govern themselves' they have to learn that 'their acceptance of the Nazi leadership made their defeat necessary' - not the defeat of the Nazi regime, not the liberation of the German people from the Nazi regime, but the defeat of the German people was needed (Willoughby, 2001: 102)
The effect of the 'collective guilt' idea was that it diluted the actual guilt of the Nazis and their supporters, while heaping blame on the German working class whose political defeat had been the overriding purpose of the Fascist regime. The new regime embraced the metaphysical concept of collective guilt, while turning a blind eye to the actual guilt of identifiable individuals. But when German workers pressed their claims, they were chided to remember that they, like all Germans, were guilty, and perhaps, as Churchill argued, after 'a generation of self-sacrifice, toil and education, something might be done with the German people' (Eisenberg, 1996: 24). When rations in the British and American Zones of Germany fell below 1100 calories provoking protests, officials explained 'the short answer is that Germany lost the war', while a delegation from the Medical Research Council dismissed complaints about children's rations on the grounds that they 'would have been regarded as satisfactory in England not so very long ago' - in other words, they had brought the problem on themselves (Meehan, 2001: 253, 248). Collective guilt was an ideology that legitimised first the Allies' rule, and then later the West German government's, while de-legitimating any claims made by the population. It also the ideological hold of an idea originally fashioned by the Nazis fashioned when they sought to implicate Germans in the 'final solution' of the Jewish question and so bind them to the regime.
[snip]
US President Roosevelt outlined the 'four freedoms' on which the new world must be founded in a speech to congress on 6 January 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The four freedoms became the moral basis for the allied forces' occupation of the continent. They put a priority on civil rights at the liberal end of the political spectrum, and on social rights (freedom from want) and security at the other end - but representative democracy was not a priority (The Atlantic Charter did 'respect the right of peoples to choose the government under which they will live' but only undertook to restore 'sovereign rights' to those who had been 'forcibly deprived of them', i.e. occupied Europe, but not the former Axis powers).
The practical challenge of ruling Germany would draw out the differences between the Allies, between a punitive peace and reconstruction, and between West and East. At Yalta, in February 1945, everybody favoured a punitive peace, with reparations for those nations damaged by Germany. In September 1945, an American paper to the Allied Control Authority's Directorate of Economics called 'A Minimum German Standard of Living in Relation to the Level of Industry', which proposed that industrial and agricultural output should be held down to the level of 1932 - the worst year of the depression in Germany (Willoughby, 2001: 91).
In August 1950, British High Commissioner Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick issued a press release rubbishing the idea that 'in the matter of dismantling or of restrictions on German industry England has been influenced by the desire to throttle German competition', adding that 'there is no danger that petty considerations such as fear of German competition will influence our policy'. In private, however, the 'petty consideration' of throttling German competition dominated British policy. Lord Cherwell thought that 'it should be possible to reach an agreement with the Russians by which they would take existing German machinery, raw materials and forced labour, while we should take Germany's export markets'. Labour's Herbert Morrison, then Lord President of the Allied Control Council, advised the Prime Minister to 'start shaping the German economy in the way which … will run the least risk of it developing into an unnecessarily awkward competitor'. Plans were drawn up 'for the total elimination of major shipyards, the equipment of which is to be allocated to reparations or destroyed'. British industries, including Courtaulds, Unilever and ICI, seconded staff to the British Civil Service to take part in the dismantling, so that they could grab machinery and technology, (Meehan, 2001: 228, 200, 207, 201, 230, 231). French, British, American and Soviet occupiers all used Germans as forced labour. British and American forces gave the French 55 000 and 800 000 prisoners respectively. Britain took 400 000 German prisoners back home to work. America had some 600 000 at work in Europe and America (Bacque, 1997: 61).
[snip]
Assessment
'The depression was finally ended not by a new prosperity but through World War II, that is, thorough the colossal destruction of capital on a worldwide scale and a restructuring of the world economy that assured the profitable expansion of capital for another period.' (Mattick, 1978: 141)
The Second World War reordered the pecking order between capitalist rivals, redistributing world shares of raw materials and markets, finance and military power, primarily facilitating US expansion into the role of global policeman, as well as lender of last resort. The destruction of capital that Mattick refers to was a condition for the restructuring of industry. Where accumulated capital had become so great as to dwarf returns, the only route to new accumulation was to devalue much of that capital stock - but that was not something that could be done voluntarily, so warfare proved to be a way of forcibly destroying the over-accumulated capital. Pointedly, those developed countries that suffered the most extreme destruction were also those that grew most rapidly after the war - Germany and Japan, who had the opportunity to build new greenfield sites, while Britain was still tacking new tools onto ancient machinery.
But the reordering of relations between the capitalist powers was premised upon reordering the relationship between capital and labour. 'The higher level of the rate of exploitation which had been brought about by force was maintained for ten years after the period of fascism', wrote Elmar Altvater, 'the "West German economic miracle" was pre-programmed in the course of the "thousand year Reich" (Altvater et al, 1974: 7, 9). Mazower agrees: 'a nazi public utility like Volkswagen, or private utility like Daimler-Benz, laid down plant and equipment in the 1930s (and early 1940s) that would form the basis for post-war growth' (Mazower, 1998: 130). But these changes were not just restricted to Germany. In all of Western Europe, post-war reconstruction was boosted by the redirection of resources from consumption to investment initially made under the discipline of war.
Beneath the conflict international, the capitalist powers had a common interest in suppressing working class opposition. Though they fought Germany over territory and markets, the Allies gained from the Nazi disciplining of the working class in Europe. Furthermore they redirected working class opposition to Fascism in Germany and Italy into support for the adoption of an enhanced industrial discipline at home. The ideology of the People's War proved even more effective a means winning authority over the working class than Nazi repression. Having been persuaded to sacrifice all in the struggle against Fascism, the masses were recruited to the stabilisation of capitalist production in Europe. The Allies gained by the German war against the partisans, too. Nazi defeats of national resistance movements made the second (Allied) occupation of Europe a great deal easier. In December 1943, the British Middle East HQ sent Captain Don Stott (pictured right) to negotiate with Hitler's envoy in Greece, Hermann Neubacher of the Gestapo on the best way to defeat the partisans. 'This war should end in a common struggle by the allies and the German forces against Bolshevism,' Stott told them (Eudes, 1972: 108).
At the same time, European national elites exhausted their moral resources when they collaborated with the Nazi reaction. The standing of European nations was shattered by the derogation of authority to successive invading powers. In Germany, the elite stood exposed for its collaboration with Fascism. The left-supported resistance movements saved national pride in Europe.
Much has been made of the 'social revolution' that the war entailed, a phrase coined by Labour MP Richard Crossman (Gallagher, 1951: 163). It is true that there were considerable changes brought about by the war. Many of these tended over time to improve the material conditions of the mass of people, like the National Health Service in the UK, or the GI Bills extending education and home loans in the US. But for the most part, these reforms were necessary for continuing the process of capitalist development. And what is more, they were paid for by the phenomenal increase in output wrung from the working class through the wartime restructuring of industry.
The political shift to the left in Western Europe after the war has entrenched the belief that a social revolution had taken place. The presence of communists in post-war governments was not a sign of a radicalisation of society, but of the contribution that the communists had made to the restoration of the nation state. And as Mark Mazower points out, the left's gains were quickly overturned: 'Across Europe, former resistance leaders were being marginalized' he writes, drawing attention to the atomisation and inwardness that overtook society at the war's end. By 1948 'the radicalisation of the war years had vanished' (Mazower, 1998: 210, 237). In fact the radicalisation was largely illusory. Nervous that they had lost all authority, ruling elites made concessions to the left immediately after the war, only to snatch them back once it became apparent that they could rule without the radicals. Substantially the war years had the effect of breaking down working class solidarity, which was either crushed, or used to promote austerity measures that wore down its appeal.
The difference between the reaction to the end of the First World War and the second is striking: in 1918, a significant section of the working class knew that they had been beaten, and wanted to do something about it; with the re-establishment of capitalist reproduction in 1945 the entire working class movement thought that they had won a great victory. That conviction was the ruling classes' greatest achievement.
April 2005
http://libcom.org/history/war-europe-wh ... heartfield
by gnosticheresy_2 » Mon Jun 20, 2011 6:06 pm
James Heartfield looks back at the events of the second world war in Europe, concluding that the motivation of the allied powers was not to save Europe from fascism or the Jews from genocide, but to protect their economic interests.
by vanlose kid » Mon Jun 20, 2011 6:54 pm
by gnosticheresy_2 » Mon Jun 20, 2011 7:08 pm
vanlose kid wrote:ok
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by vanlose kid » Tue Jun 21, 2011 2:15 pm
gnosticheresy_2 wrote:vanlose kid wrote:ok
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Re-reading what I wrote it comes across as me being hostile to you vk, which wasn't my intention. My comments ("hate to burst your bubble" etc) were aimed at the author of the piece, not you and I should have made that clearer, sorry.
by gnosticheresy_2 » Tue Jun 21, 2011 4:23 pm
vanlose kid wrote:gnosticheresy_2 wrote:vanlose kid wrote:ok
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Re-reading what I wrote it comes across as me being hostile to you vk, which wasn't my intention. My comments ("hate to burst your bubble" etc) were aimed at the author of the piece, not you and I should have made that clearer, sorry.
nah, it's cool. i kind of gathered that you were taking down the post and not my person, plus i'm assuming you never got past the part you quoted. that's how it seemed to me anyway.
but i am curious as to what school you went to and which books were assigned because i have a hard time imagining any UK school teaching that the entire WWII show was a battle between fascist forces on all sides whose aims were among other things to discipline the workers , and not rah-rah-rah brit-bulldog saving private ryan sentimentalism. as in UK fascists beat German fascists, hurray! especially when the present state of things is taken into account.
one could, however, imagine that your teachers were an exception to the rule. that i'd believe. no offense.
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)by vanlose kid » Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:48 am
by vanlose kid » Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:06 am
by gnosticheresy_2 » Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:52 pm
vanlose kid wrote:^ ^
gh, the reason i remarked on it is because, to my experience, what you've described seems more of an anomaly than anything. not the economic aspect but the fact that both the west and the axis were presented as equal opportunity fascists (the norm was and is hitler was a madman, germans are sicko, the anglosphere is the home of freedom and democracy etc. basic WWII propaganda taught as history). i've temped a bit and i know for a fact that going anywhere near there would bring down the wrath of umpteen parents and the school board. that's why i asked. also, i had a history and social sciences teacher who kind of sort of went there but more by way of hinting, and he was communist (not something he spoke of loudly either), i.e. he knew where he wasn't meant to go but managed to get some of us looking. not many, some.
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by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Aug 30, 2011 8:12 am
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