UNPATRIOTIC HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (Clapham – 6.00pm)
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Comment from Richard Montague"In the period immediately following the defeat of the Axis powers the victorious Allies sanctified their massive and deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians by exposing and exploiting the terrible crimes of the Nazis and the implied suggestion that these gave Britain and France their moral justification for declaring war on Germany in response to the German invasion of Poland on the 1st of September 1939. But the ghastly script for the second segment of the World War was written into the Treaty of Varsellies which was the Allie's victory charter that ended the first part of global madness and created the material conditions for a second round.The month-old ink on an Anglo-Polish mutual-assistance pact of August 1939, that made it clear to Germany that, if it made war on Poland, Britain (and France, under a similar non-agression pact) would come to the aid of Poland. Neville Chamberland, apparently genuinely moved as he made his formal declaration of war, after German troops had crossed the Polish border in September 1939, made a personal appeal to Adolph Hitler to withdraw German troops and avoid the horror of war. The awful plight of German Jews was never an issue nor was the fact that Britain and France had ignored a simultaneous invasion by Russian troops across Poland's eastern flank!"
HollyHead wrote:Has he been told?He might like to link to/from his own website.HHGood thinking, Double H – I've just emailed him now.cheers
The Second World War RevisitedJohn Molyneux's (key figure in the SWP) review of Donny Gluckstein's book
Another review of Gluckstein's book by a fellow SWPer:http://resolutereader.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/donny-gluckstein-peoples-history-of.html
That reminds me. James Heartfield has put links on his site to both our review and our recording of the meeting. He has added photo of his own. See http://www.heartfield.org/
I came across this informative earlier article by James Heartfield called "World War as Class War" for those unable to afford his book.http://libcom.org/history/world-war-class-warThere is wealth of details and facts."…The war changed the balance between labour and capital. Most think that it shifted the balance in labour's favour. The real lesson of the Second World War was that it crushed the independent organisations of the working class…For the workers, wartime regimentation was hard graft on low wages. Business, though, made a fortune out of the war…As well as working more people harder for longer, business and government worked together to hold down their wages – so boosting industry's operating profits. Holding down wages was not easy because putting so many more people to work ought to have pushed wages up. In fact, in cash terms, weekly wages did go up. But on closer inspection we find that hourly wages tended to go down. People were working for much longer hours, sometimes giving up their time for free, often losing out on overtime payments. What increases there were in wages did not keep pace with the increase in output…"…The Allies used forced labour, too. Forty-eight thousand men aged 18 to 25 were sent down Britain's mines between 1943 and 1948. 21,000 seventeen year-olds were forced to dig. They were called the 'Bevin Boys' … the Allies were more brutal to subject peoples. On 1 August 1942 the British colony of Rhodesia passed a Compulsory Native Labour Act to force Xhosa people to work on settlers' farms and as labourers at the large air force bases…In Brazil 55 000 people were drafted as 'Rubber Soldiers' to work in the Amazon under a deal between US President Roosevelt and the dictator, Getúlio Vargas to fill America's rubber shortage – hundreds died of malaria……Britain was the first country ever to introduce conscription for women…Germany did not put many more women to work, even when war production minister Albert Speer begged the Führer t.."
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