Russian Tensions
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You ask a hard question
Wez, I think you know the timeline of the Holocaust.
Death camps did not exist in 1939.
There is the belief that the extermination of mentally handicapped, the extremist part of the globally accepted eugenic programme, of the 1930s, was the beginning.
There is a belief that the war atrocities committed on the Eastern Front created the conditions where a more systematic genocide became possible.
Mass killings, mostly by deliberate neglect took place against the millions of Russian POWs.
The Wannsee Conference that rubber-stamped the extermination policy was January 1942.
Did the allies treat the existence of the death camps when they became informed of details as reasons to shift gears in the war and re-prioritize? Not at all.
Has the slaughter and genocide of any peoples affected political positions? Did Rwanda bring any intervention?
In an ideal world such as socialism, if any such mass killings occurred, solidarity would urge us to halt it, even with force. We are not pacifists. Peacefully if possible, violently if necessary, is the old Chartist slogan we have adopted.
But by participating as supporters of the war, would we have supported the Second World War strategy of ending the war with the bombing of German cities and condoning the deaths of German civilians?
It is a question asked also by those who witnessed Japanese cruelty of occupied countries and the inhumane treatment of prisoners. Could we approve of the two atomic bombs?
Even with what we know now I hesitate to justify the war and without the 20-20 hindsight our members face during the war, I cannot think they could be blamed for the stance they made.
One of the merits of the Bolsheviks was that they did not support World War One and the war ended. Real Socialists do not support wars and the carnage of other members of the working class including the military on any site which is also a member of the working class, as well socialists do not support nationalism and patriotism and the so-called self-determination of the nation.
The Socialist Party took the correct stand and continues taking the correct stand, we have never supported any wars including the so-called wars of national liberation, which only liberate one ruling class from another ruling class, and our stand on the so-called patriotic war of the soviet union and the patriotic war of Vietnam was correct. The Vietcong became the rulers of the Vietnamese workers
This is an issue that was settled many years ago, even more, Rosa Luxembourg took a much better stand than Marx regarding Poland, and it can apply to all kinds of nationalism and patriotism, as well as the concept that all capitalist countries are potentially imperialists or expansionists applies to all capitalist countries and it is correct too
It is funny Lenin wrote the Renegade Kautsky because Karl Kautsky changed his Marxist point of view and ended up supporting the capitalist class and wars credits in 1900 instead of 1914 as Lenin wrote, and now many Leninists support wars and inter-capitalist disputes.
The Marxist humanists are saying that Lenin was ambivalent because after 1914 he wrote Imperialism and that he became a Hegelian by reading the science of Lenin of Hegel, but he was not ambivalent, it was the same Lenin in 1903 who developed Lasalle/Kaustsky/Jacobin vanguard party concept and 1914 who was surprised by the stand taken by the second international, but the second international also developed the vanguard party to lead and his description of imperialism in some way taken from Nikolai Bukharin and it is wrong too especially on his concept of economic exploitation
TS, Having already explained to us previously that the war began in 2014 in a civil war against the two breakaway regions and that the Minsk Talks had broken down, can you explain why it took Putin all those years to invade?
There is much evidence of a low-level war against Russian-speaking inhabitants of Luhansk and Donetz, yet it also took Putin many years to officially recognise their independence.
Was ethnic-cleansing the real reason?
Doesn’t Russia have its own nazi problem with ultra-nationalism? Ever heard of the Russian Imperial Movement? Or the Rusich Task Force? Or the many splinter groups from Russian National Unity.
Or as we suggest, it was the broader Great Power rivalry of geo-politics in regard to economic and military alliances and the timing involved in those.
That a proxy war is the reason that Western nations are subsidizing Ukraine’s war and are not urging peace talks.
TS “So what was the Soviet Union to do after the Nazi invasion? Surrender? You must be joking?”
That is the same answer given by Zelensky.
Nor does it explain why the Communist Parties, following Moscow’s party-line still opposed the war when war was declared in 1939 and several European countries were invaded in 1940.
It is a diatribe because you throw unsubstantiated slurs such as “you are an unprincipled and unctuous charlatan.” and “you are a coward, your answer is yes. You’d willingly walk into the oven because you have no spine.”
I could go on.
If you cannot recognise the difference in the tone of my replies to you and your own, then sorry, but I pity you.
TrollScotsman must also admire the Russian Patriarch as a good example, alongside the Orthodox Christian Putin.
The patriarch says this is a war against sexual immorality (by which he means sexual minorities). So these sexual minorities must be Nazis.Meanwhile Stalin was carrying out his own massacres, and blaming Katyn on the Germans.
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Stalin gave Molotov green light to make alliance with the Nazis, and the Nazis used the Russia territory to purchase and transport raw materials for their industry, by the meantime the soviet ruling class was making high profits. Ford and Taylor assembly line and industrial engineering were imposed on the Russian workers to produce more and to obtain higher surplus value from their sweat
Thomas_More
Participant
By definition, Stalin’s “socialism in one country” = national socialism (Nazism for short).A concept developed by Nikolai Bukharin ( also supported by Lenin ) and later on he was shot. The concept was created because they were expecting proletarian revolution in Germany and France and it did not take place, and they became isolated because socialism in an economical backward country can not be established and they knew that too, as well Lenin made a large economical research before writing the Development of capitalism in Russia including statistic, and it shows that capitalism was not the prevailing system, it was an agrarian society, as well Lenin approved Trotsky theory of permanent revolution
Stalin also had no confidence in Mao. He supported Chiang right up to 1949. Indeed, Chiang had studied in the Soviet Union and had Soviet advisers before switching to German ones.
Mao, and later Ho Chi Minh too, hoped for American support.
read somewhere that Stalin assisted the German steel industry (?)
He was doing like some dictators and presidents in Latin America that were playing both sides, like Domingo Peron and Rafael L Trujillo, even more before his assassination he was negotiating with the Soviet Union to become part of its sphere of influence like Fidel Castro did in Cuba
Moderator Comment
Thomas More’s post has somehow got lost in cyber universe. This is his missing post:-
Was the war against Nazism, in fact?
No.Never was the process of extermination disturbed by the Allies, who certainly had the power to do it. Never were the rail networks supplying the camps attacked.
No attention was paid to Jewish representatives, nor to the appeals of Kurt Gerstein, who attempted sabotage of the gassing wherever he could.I believe it was a British cabinet member who exclaimed, “Do we have to listen to these wailing Jews?” (But of this i’m not sure).
The Operation Reinhardt (Final Solution) was not of interest to the Allied war effort to disrupt. Far from it. It would prove an asset to let continue, as post-war justification for the myth of why the war was fought.
German capitalists were boosted with bonuses after the war – the same capitalists who had profited from Operation Reinhardt.
The Socialist Standard pointed out that the nationalism of the British workers only reinforced support for Hitler among the German workers.
Was the mass bombing of German cities like Dresden a war on Nazism? Or mass murder in itself?
As for the brave revolts at Treblinka and Sobibor, yes, I support them. But the mass murder of German men, women and children, no!
It is capitalism which produces these horrors, and both sides are dupes, hoodwinked by patriotism.
The UK, US, and Russia have been exploiting WW2 ever since to boost patriotism and justify wars as battles between “good” and “evil”, instead of the capitalist squabbles they really are.
I refer Wez to the Sept. 1989 issue of the Standard and the link I placed recently here on The Economic Roots.
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