Ignorance of history is often deliberate

On July 9, 2019, “The Montreal Gazette” reprinted a commentary by Windsor Star columnist Gord Henderson entitled “Deeply troubling how little we know of our past”. It was all about how so many millions of Canadians, Americans and Britons, responding to polls about their knowledge of the Second World War, concerning such specific events as the 1944 “D-day” invasion of German-occupied France, and the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, were unable to even identify who their nation’s enemy was back then, or had not even heard about the Holocaust. Which then prompted several Gazette readers to write letters to the editor agreeing with Henderson about how really important it was for every concerned citizen to know at least something about the past, in order to comprehend anything about current events.

A sentiment with which I could not agree more. Especially since the Henderson piece was published only a few days after I wrote my own blogpost (“Lest we forget what?”) about the Second World War. Which tried to show in quite a few different ways how incredibly inaccurate were the official declarations pronounced at the 75th anniversary commemorations of the 1944 “D-day” landings in Normandy. According to which the successful invasion of German-occupied France back then supposedly inaugurated a period of “liberal democracy”, following the world-wide defeat of fascism.

In the real world, however, only a relatively small number of countries were ruled by anything resembling what is officially called “liberal democracy”, and even then only for a limited time (centring on the so-called “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975). That has been replaced since the 1970s by a much less democratic period of history, under the control of the even more hypocritical ideology known as neoliberalism. Whose basic premise from the outset has always been that “private enterprise” (Big Business) should take over complete control of the world economy, and of social policy in every country, thereby forever dumping both economic nationalism (government “intervention”) and social-democracy (the “welfare state”) into the dustbin of history.

Neoliberalism first came to power back in 1973, when the US economists known as “the Chicago Boys” were invited to run the Chilean economy by military dictator Augusto Pinochet. But it really took off world-wide after the 1979 election of conservative politician Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and the 1980 election of her American “bosom buddy”, Ronald Reagan. Since that time, neoliberalism has come to be the dominant economic and social ideology throughout the world, not only in the still formally “liberal-democratic” group of countries, but also in all those very numerous countries that have recently succumbed to a gigantic, world-wide wave of ultra-right-wing populism, also known as neofascism.

In some of those countries still officially classified as liberal-democratic, the neofascist movement has so far been confined to increasingly popular, but not yet governing, parties such as the National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany party. However, in several other, still theoretically liberal-democratic countries, the national government has recently been taken over by several different varieties of neofascism, such as the almost personal dictatorship run by the Trump billionaire in the USA, as well as the Hindu-nationalist Modi regime in India. In Israel, a country that has always adopted a neocolonialist attitude toward its Arab minority and its contiguous Palestinian colony, the Netanyahu regime has also recently become even more considerably racist than it used to be.

In the meantime, over the past four decades, neoliberal policies adopted all over the world have enormously enlarged the already considerable income gap between the social classes, causing huge resentment among millions of poor and middle-class people, very few of whom have profited at all from any of the new wealth created since 1979. To the extent that even the acting director of the International Monetary Fund, David Lipton, has called for a return to greater government “intervention”, and an end to world-wide tax evasion, without providing any hint as to how that complete about-face could possible be effected. In the meantime, the neoliberal income chasm is still growing larger every day, a situation which has gone a long way toward fuelling ultra-right-wing populism in every part of the world. Populist neofascism, however, which was supposed to “drain the liberal swamp”, has done exactly the opposite instead. Making it possible for ultra-corrupt, ultra-rich people to make even more money than they did before, at the expense of everyone else, as well as of the much-maligned natural environment.

Curiously enough, neoliberalism is still being practised not only in the formerly liberal-democratic countries already mentioned, but also in such authoritarian (neofascist) countries as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. The very long list of such places also includes many Latin American nations (Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, etc.), many more countries not already mentioned in Europe (Italy, Poland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belarus, Bulgaria, etc.), many African nations (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, etc.), and many more countries not already mentioned in Asia (Myanmar, the Philippines, Vietnam, North Korea, etc.).

So what is the connection between all these trends in current events and the history lesson that Gord Henderson was giving his Canadian readers back on July 9? The fact is that all the neoliberal and neofascist regimes that make up this incredibly long list of beleaguered nations are also relying very heavily indeed on deliberate falsification of history in order to prop up their disgusting policies. None of these regimes, whether Donald Trump’s huge United States of America or Paul Kagame’s tiny Rwanda, could remain in power for more than a week if they had not managed to convince large numbers of citizens in the general population that what they are doing, or at least trying to do, is based on their firm and undying opposition to all the horrible crimes committed by their most important predecessors.

Every “ordinary person” has to be made to believe that everything going wrong in their lives these days is the exclusive fault of those regimes’ opponents, i.e., the world’s scheming, plotting, manipulative, international-liberal politicians and their compradore collaborators. Even the “invasion” of dozens of different countries (not only in the Western world, but in all the other regions of the world as well), by immigrants fleeing from the world’s most horribly violent countries, cannot ever be “fixed” by the neofascist populists, who are even more inhuman than were their liberal-imperialist predecessors.

It is extremely interesting to note, in this context, that none of the Gazette readers agreeing with Henderson about everyone’s unfortunate ignorance of history, paid any attention to the last part of his article. In which he condemned various “left-wing social activists” for having unduly criticized such “great men” from the past as Canada’s Sir John A. MacDonald, and Great Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill. Henderson got especially indignant when he denounced an un-named “Toronto Star columnist” for having condemned Henderson’s own “personal hero”, Winston Churchill, as a racist and a colonialist, as well as for having failed “to prevent a famine in India at the height of the (Second World) war”. The culprit from the “Toronto Star” seems to have been that newspaper’s race and gender columnist, Shree Paradkar, who on March 9, 2018, published a piece called “When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands?”. Enough to get poor old Gord Henderson’s knickers into quite an elaborate twist.

It seems that Paradkar first found out about the 1943 famine in the Bengal region of British India, during which three million people died, when she read a 2014 magazine article about “remembering India’s forgotten holocaust”. Which, according to the books that I read twenty years ago, when I was preparing my courses on Third World history, was indeed considerably exacerbated when the colonial authorities refused to do anything to help alleviate the famine. Not to forget that the eastern part of British India, where the Bengal region is located, was under a land-and-sea attack by the Japanese empire in 1942-1943, and that radical nationalist Chandra Bose, the former president of the Congress Party (who was ousted by Gandhi at the beginning of the war), collaborated with both the Nazis and the Japanese in an unsuccessful attempt to free India from the British. He eventually managed to convince several thousand Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese in Singapore, to join the fight against the British empire in Malaya. Several sources that I read back then made the not unreasonable suggestion that the British authorities may not have been terribly keen to help the suffering Bengalis in India while they were still fighting against Japan throughout the southeast Asian portion of their empire.

Paradkar also mentioned in her article that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955, not only refused to send food to alleviate the Bengal famine, but also authorized British Army killings of pro-communist anti-fascists in Greece in 1944, as well as sending several thousand Kenyan anti-colonialists into British gulags during his post-war period of power. As far as I can recall from my own readings on colonial history, none of Paradkar’s accusations seem terribly out of place. As for Churchill, he was definitely a racist and a colonialist, from his military participation in several British colonial wars towards the end of the nineteenth century, right up until the end of his political career over fifty years later. It seems that along the way he even managed to support Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, in several parliamentary speeches, only changing his mind for good after Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler in 1938.

In spite of all that, it is still true, as Henderson claimed, that Churchill indeed stood fast “against the rampaging Nazis after the surrender of France”, having in 1940 replaced his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, who had lost all support in Britain after the failure of his disastrous Munich appeasement with Adolf Hitler in 1938-1939. Not to forget that other Western politicians from the same era, such as Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, also participated in that misbegotten appeasement of Hitler during his own friendly visit with the German chancellor in 1937. Meanwhile, in the USA, several hugely important patricians, such as Henry Ford and Prescott Bush (the father of George HW Bush and the grandfather of George W Bush), were also urging their government to support the Nazis against the communists, or at least to remain neutral during the war, rather than join the anti-fascist alliance.

The fact that Churchill, in spite of his racist and colonialist leanings, nevertheless led the British to participate in the world-wide victory against Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers in 1945, is simply part of history. Presumably, Winston’s own patriotic allegiance to the British Empire made it impossible for him to kowtow to Adolf Hitler’s rapidly expanding German empire. According to some sources, during the 1939-1940, eight-month-long “phoney war”, when there was not a lot of military activity between the British and the Germans, those two powers were trying to come to some kind of political arrangement involving an exchange of colonies, that fell through because Hitler wanted the British to give him half of their empire.

In any case, during the second phase of the war (1941-1945), the anti-fascist allies also included the USSR (much more totalitarian than it was communist), as well as all the very powerful, nominally-communist parties in several other countries. Which meant that a world-wide, liberal-communist alliance was created, that no one in his or her right mind could possibly have predicted in 1938, when Britain and France signed the short-lived Munich agreement with Germany and Italy.

During the war itself, the anti-fascist alliance also included such politicians as the free-French general Charles de Gaulle, who later became a genuinely authoritarian president of France, especially after his infamous 1958 “coup d’état”, as well as having held racist and colonialist beliefs himself for quite a long time. Even when he lost power in France in 1969, he waited only a few months before going off to Spain for a friendly visit with pro-fascist military dictator Francisco Franco, who he had never had the chance to meet up with before. In other words, for various different reasons, all sorts of people joined the anti-Axis alliance during the Second World War, including more than a few people who shared at least a small part of the Axis leaders’ ideological leanings.

The problem with naive people in every period of history, like Canadian columnist Gord Henderson nowadays, is that they are always looking for some simple explanation for what are in fact very complicated events. Which often leads them into completely irrational hero worship of famous politicians like Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, who hated each other almost as much as they hated their fascist adversaries. Unfortunately, hero worship also helps to explain why so many millions of other people throughout history also supported many considerably more extremist politicians as well, such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Admiral Tojo, Joseph Stalin and Mao Ze dong. Not to mention today’s equally varied crop of racist, sexist, neocolonialist and neofascist leaders, such as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Recep Erdogan, Mohammad bin Salman, Ali Khamenei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, and so on and so forth. Not to mention such currently non-governing extremists as Marine LePen and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

When I was doing my research for my university and college courses, not only on the history of the Third World but also on the history of Western civilization, it soon became obvious to me that this kind of hero-worship, and the deliberate manipulation of historical evidence on which it is based, is true not only of the more recent decades of human existence on this planet, but also of all the prior periods of history as well. Every single political regime ever constructed has always fabricated its own elaborate historical machinations, dedicated towards “proving” that it and it alone truly deserves to be forever ruling its own part of the world, or the entire world in some cases. It turns out that the “thousand-year Reich” of Adolf Hitler (that only lasted for twelve years in the real world) was merely one of a hundred thousand other ideological constructions that have been invented over the past several millennia, to justify whatever disgusting elitist, racist, misogynist, imperialist and fascist regimes that hero-worshippers all over the world have been spewing forth over the centuries.

So, instead of giving in once again to the most recent examples of historical manipulation, by strengthening neoliberalism and neofascism even more than before, what we should be doing in its place is learning from our past mistakes and developing ways of avoiding the current dichotomy between national development and international cooperation. While at the same time overcoming the ever-increasing divisions between the social classes, and between the genders, as well as gradually integrating the rival cultures that currently exist all over the world into a single, universal whole. Which is to say building up all-inclusive solutions to each one of those formidable dichotomies, solutions that do not break down under pressure from the populist extremism currently emanating from each one of those opposing groups.

In other words, by doing exactly the opposite of what human beings have been doing to each other up to and including the recent, conjoined, “open conspiracy” of neoliberalism and neofascism, all over the world. Which also means doing exactly the opposite of what we have been doing to each other since the beginning of time, which is to say creating as many political, economic, social and cultural divisions as possible, to keep us all forever divided into separate, competing, communitarian fabrications. We have to at least try, before it is too late, to gradually reunite humanity over time without falling into the obvious trap of merely providing new ideological cover for the imperialist designs of any one particular grouping.

Needless to say, however, getting back together again in a real way, rather than in a fake way, is not at all what most people are doing nowadays. Trying to impose some particular hero, or some particular project, on everyone else, is what most politically-minded people are into these days. What we really need is what I call “equal opportunity” denunciations of every heteronymic quagmire currently being advertised all over the world, whether it is white supremacy, moral rearmament, bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth, making “America” great again, the international community of the free market, the reconstruction of the “great silk road”, the revival of the medieval Islamic caliphate, the return of all the world’s lands to whoever got there first, or whatever other magical reinterpretation of the past about which various different ideological formations have recently fantasized.

Which also means that we have to stop promoting wilful ignorance of the lessons of real human history, as a necessary part of bringing everyone else under some particular system’s version of thought control. Just like what Gord Henderson was proposing, which is to say deliberate, and not just random, ignorance of what really took place in the past, whether last year or a hundred thousand years ago. Cultural wars (Kulturkampf), after all, are won much more on the ideological battlefield than they are on the military one.

“Lest we forget” what?

In this particular blogpost, I want to write an “autopsy” of the recent 75th anniversary commemorations of the 1944, “D-day” invasion of the Normandy region in German-occupied France. In order to emphasize, in several different ways, how much of a gap there was between the official interpretation of what happened back then, and a much more realistic approach toward the part played by that invasion in the Second World War. As well as trying to underline some of the more important effects of that incredibly destructive war on the world that we are still living in nowadays. “We” who are being asked not to forget that particular invasion, and the rest of the war as well, for a number of very specific, but not often very good, reasons.

The best way to start is by pointing out the extremely obvious, but nevertheless curiously forgotten, fact that in order for anyone to actually remember anything significant about what happened back then, one would have to be at least 80 years old right now. Which means that most of the people nowadays being asked not to forget are, by definition, much too young to remember anything at all about that period of history. Just like absolutely everyone being asked every year, on Remembrance Day, to “remember” the November 11, 1918 armistice ending the First World War, is definitely going to have to rely on someone else’s history lesson in order to remember whatever that person is not supposed to be “forgetting”.

Like any other historical event, the best way to find out what happened during World War II is not to believe any of the official propaganda, from any particular country, about what took place back then, at least not at first glance. In order to get a better idea about the entire context of that war, one has to read at least several hundred pages of professional historical accounts of that period, like I did many years ago when I was preparing to give a 45-hour college course on the subject, during several consecutive semesters. Not just about the most relevant military events, but also about all the other political, economic, social and cultural aspects as well. Including historical information coming not only from researchers trying to justify their own country’s particular role in the war, but also from many other researchers who were highly critical of all those politically biased evaluations.

Which means that people nowadays trying to find out what really happened during any historical event of this magnitude have to be very careful. What we are faced with here, as in so many other cases, is a blatant attempt on the part of today’s authorities to get millions of people all over the world to celebrate their official interpretation of what the D-day landing, and the war as a whole, was all about. Not so much because it is important to recognize the “supreme sacrifice” that millions of soldiers, and millions more civilians, all over the world, made back then, some of them for a relatively good cause, others for a much more evil cause. 

It is at least as important not to forget that almost all the civilian victims in that war were not intentionally “sacrificing” themselves in any real sense because they died during such involuntary events as aerial bombings, or incarceration in death camps (not all of which were run by German, or Japanese, officials). Even most of the soldiers involved were either conscripted, or answering “the call of duty” because they could not find jobs during the Great Depression, and foolishly believed that the war would be all over anyway within a few months.

As so often happens, it turns out that the main reason why we are all supposed to be “remembering” D-day is because the politicians representing the victorious powers on the Western front, in charge of this year’s 75th anniversary commemorations, wanted to make a point about how much more liberal-democratic our world currently is than it would have been had the Axis powers won the war. While it ought to be obvious to everyone that things would have been a lot worse than they really were if the other side had won the war, it is not at all obvious that the post-war world can genuinely be characterized as “liberal-democratic”.

In the first place, this is because during the longer, and more murderous, second phase of the war (1941-1945), the Western powers were, after all, allied with the USSR, which was almost as totalitarian as the Axis powers. This was not yet the case during the first phase of the war, which started in 1937 in Asia and in 1939 in Europe, when the Soviet Union reacted to the Western powers’ initial Munich (1938-1939) capitulation to fascist imperialism (Italy and Germany), in Ethiopia as well as in Europe, by signing its own “non-aggression” pact (1939-1941) with Adolph Hitler. Which meant that the USSR was not involved all that much in the war during that first phase, except for having fought off an attempted Japanese invasion of Siberia a short time before the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed.

The only other Soviet “participation” in that earlier part of the war was by physically occupying the parts of Eastern Europe assigned to the Soviet empire by the terms of its temporary alliance with the German empire, and putting down any national rebellions against its rule, like the one in Finland. Several large Communist Parties in the West, such as the one in France, also sat out that part of the war by refusing to mobilize against the fascist invasions of their home countries.

However, when the same Adolph Hitler abruptly repudiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1941, and instead launched an all-out Axis assault on the Soviet Union, Stalin was obliged to join the war against the European fascists, while simultaneously adopting a neutral attitude toward Japan (except during the last few months of the war). Even while trying to survive that onslaught, the Soviet regime was still, however, a falsely-communist version of the previously-established Russian empire. Which meant that it treated the people under its rule, especially non-Russian people, very poorly indeed, almost as poorly as the fascist imperialists treated their own subject populations.

After the Second World War, and mostly because of what happened during the second phase, the state-capitalist hierarchy running the Soviet Union grew into a large Soviet bloc of countries, eventually ruling almost one-third of the entire world, including most of Eastern Europe, several east Asian countries (most of China, half of Korea, all of Laos, and, by 1975, all of Vietnam, not to mention the short-lived Maoist regime in Cambodia), as well as Cuba (1960). Besides building on its long-standing alliance with dozens of anti-Western national liberation movements, many of which had come to power in the post-war, post-colonial period of history. The Soviet bloc, however, was not exactly what most people have in mind when they use the expression “liberal democracy”.

Nevertheless, it was what the USSR and the millions of Communist Party members in other countries did to destroy the Axis powers during the second phase of the war that left them with an enormous amount of prestige after 1945. One of the main problems with most of the official Western accounts of the events of the war is that they somehow manage to avoid making very many references to the Eastern front, in which the Soviet Union fought almost by itself against the 1941-1944 onslaught of Nazi Germany and its Eastern European allies, being helped out only by several thousand pro-communist partisans, particularly those in Yugoslavia.

During those extremely bleak years, precious little aid came from the West, which only managed to send about four percent of the military supplies used by the USSR in its fight for survival. With the result that the Soviet Union lost about 27 million people killed during the war, a “killing field” that was made even worse by the “scorched-earth” policy of the initial Soviet retreat. Those 27 million dead people nevertheless amounted to a very significant portion of the total world-wide loss of about 65 million human beings.

During that second phase of the war, the USSR ended up fighting against twice as many Axis troops as did their new-found Western allies, who chose to fight only in places like North Africa, Italy, and the Atlantic Ocean (including naval battles off the coasts of North and South America). The Normandy invasion of German-occupied Western Europe (1944-1945), even though very difficult, would therefore have been a great deal more deadly than it already was had the main part of the German army not been fighting against the USSR at the same time.

Up until D-day, the Western powers were quite content to let the Germans and the Russians kill each other off in very large numbers, their own “contribution” to all that bloodletting being the massive and deliberate bombardment of civilian targets in German-occupied territories, as well as in Germany itself (a scenario also repeated in Japanese-occupied territories and in Japan). Which meant putting off D-day until the USSR’s anti-Axis counter-attack threatened to leave all of continental Europe in Soviet hands by the end of the war.

This downplaying of the importance of the Eastern front in Europe also carried over into an accompanying under-emphasis on all the other fronts in the war, the self-centred Western powers, like all the other powers in the world, always believing that everything that they did was necessarily way more important than whatever any rival power ever did. But the Second World War turned out to be much more of a world-wide conflict than the First World War, not so much because of all the fighting in various different parts of Africa and western Asia (both wars having included those two regions), but especially because of the much more extensive fighting having also taken place in the eastern part of Asia, centring on China but also including major battles as far west as India, and as far south-east as Indonesia. Not to forget the enormous Pacific Ocean region, from Hawaii to New Guinea. A popular, military chronicle of all that world-wide fighting (complete with lots of maps and photos) can be found In Yann Magdelaine’s book, Atlas de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Éditions Ouest-France, 2014.

The Second World War was also a larger war than the first one because a lot more countries were officially involved, even in regions in which there was not a lot of direct military activity. Even theoretically “neutral” countries, like Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden, as well as Thailand (at least at the beginning of the war), actually helped the Axis powers in several different ways much more than they helped the Allies. Millions more colonial soldiers either volunteered, or were conscripted, into the armies of the Second World War than in the First World War, especially in places like India (mostly on the British side but also including several thousand soldiers on the Japanese side). The Russian-dominated Soviet Union also had to fight, at least towards the beginning of the war, with nationalist armies in countries like the Ukraine, which were often pro-fascist as well. Some of the Western countries conquered by the Germans, such as Vichy France, also collaborated with their former enemies for similar reasons.

Another very significant aspect of World War II has to do with women’s role in the war, which in most cases did not contribute all that much either to the progress of liberal democracy. There were very few female combat soldiers back then (quite rare in those days, even in the USSR), but millions more women than in the First World War participated as nurses, secretaries and support staff. Many more millions of them also trooped back into the factories than had already worked there during the previous war, as industrial workers replacing men sent into combat. All of which certainly had a long-term, positive effect on the partial emancipation of women, especially in the Western countries.

Nevertheless, the most important effect of that horrible war on women, all over the world, was as victims. As usually happens in such cases, whenever enormous civilian casualties are racked up in a war situation, such as during bombing campaigns aimed at punishing the overall enemy population, millions more women (and children) die than do men. Partly because, after all, most of the men were off getting themselves killed somewhere else.

Millions of other women also “participated” in the war as victims of rape, and all the horrible consequences of rape, each one of the world’s overwhelmingly-male armies having engaged in unofficial warfare against the female population wherever they went. The official ideologies being practised by each major power (liberalism, fascism, communism, etc.) having little or no influence on the sexual appetites of most of their soldiers. Nor on the sexual appetites of most of their officers.

Nor, for that matter, whenever there were insufficient numbers of women (or little girls) to go around, did those ideologies have much of an influence on homosexual rape, the number of mostly forced sexual encounters between men in every war situation being several times greater than the more normal, consensual, homosexual activity of peacetime. Which effectively puts the lie to popular propaganda, as in the facetious 1950s US military musical, “South Pacific”, about how there was never anything wrong with any man in the US army during the war that could not be solved by putting him near a “female, feminine, girlish, womanly dame”.

In fact, the Second World War was probably the most concentrated period of world-wide atrocities in human history. The Axis powers, particularly the German Nazis and the Japanese militarists, were definitely the main sources of many of those atrocities, not only in the concentration camps that soon became physical-elimination camps for millions of people, but also in hundreds of other, “lesser” evils. But the Allies, not just the Soviet ones but all the other allies as well, committed their own “fair share” of atrocities, such as the aerial bombing campaigns against civilian populations, culminating in the USA’s use of the atomic bomb against two Japanese cities in 1945.

Not so much to end the war quickly and therefore to reduce the potential increase in the overall number of dead American soldiers (the official reason), but mostly to make sure that the American empire did not have to share occupied Japan with the Soviet empire, like it had to do with occupied Germany. As is always the case in such horrendous events, millions of “ordinary people” also profited from “the war effort” to commit crimes and to settle old scores with their neighbours. Every kind of inhuman, human activity became much more popular during the war than it was in peacetime.

In addition to all those very significant differences between the kind of (“fake-news”) war officially being commemorated during the D-day ceremonies, and a more realistic interpretation of what took place back then, it is just as important to emphasize that the liberal form of capitalism, based largely on private investment (as opposed to the various different kinds of state-capitalism), has not very often been terribly democratic. Liberal capitalism was first conceptualized back in the eighteenth century, towards the end of the period of classical mercantilism (commercial capitalism and colonial expansion, initiated by the absolute monarchy), which corresponds to the same centuries also known as the “early-modern” period (1453-1789).

Since its inception back then, liberal capitalism has gone through several succeeding stages of development, adjusting itself in different ways to the overall political-economic conjuncture of each succeeding period of history. In the nineteenth century, it was focused on promoting an ultra-individualist, largely inhuman, socio-economic kind of liberalism, also known as laissez-faire, which meant all-out profit maximization and mistreating the ever-increasing working-class, at home and in the colonies, in every possible way. All of which set the stage for the inter-imperialist rivalry culminating in the First World War.

During the 1880s, and continuing for almost a century afterward, working-class resistance to laissez-faire and the simultaneous expansion of modern imperialism all over the world, led to the development of neo-mercantilism. Which is to say a general and gradual tendency to return to a more interventionist form of liberal capitalism, in order to deal with such enormous crises as the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the cold war, while still avoiding the dirigiste extremes of the fascist or communist varieties of state-capitalism. 

During the “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975), especially in the Western countries, this led to what German social-economist Wolfgang Streeck has called “democratic capitalism”, in which liberalism tolerated the rise of a strong labour movement as well as the so-called welfare state, particularly in countries that had developed powerful social-democratic parties. CIA attempts at using allies coming from organized crime, and from the right-wing sections of those same social-democratic parties, in order to weaken the popularity of the Communist Parties in the West, did not always succeed very well.

Even in its mildly interventionist period, however, to remain true to itself liberal capitalism still had to focus on the maximization of private profit, without extracting quite as large a percentage as before of its privately-accumulated wealth, directly from the Western working-class. To pull that off, while still allowing its overseas colonies (mostly in Africa and in Asia) to gain political independence at the same time, liberalism turned to a much more virulent form of economic neocolonialism, than the kind that had already been tried out in a more limited way in precociously post-colonial Latin America, back in the nineteenth century.

The idea being to continue exploiting all the former colonies, even more than before, by greatly expanding the previously-founded compradore relationship between extremely rich private investors in the neo-imperialist countries, and their not-nearly-so-rich but still dominant elites in the neocolonial countries. While also, simultaneously, increasingly developing ever more technologically advanced forms of exploitation of the natural world, the result of which eventually caused the world’s current ecological crisis, through totally irrational and deliberately unregulated profit maximization, at the expense of every possible “externality”.

All of which means that during the “thirty glorious years” at least, liberal capitalism did in fact give the impression that it had become significantly more democratic than it had been before that time. Particularly for people whose judgement was being influenced by the facile comparison between liberal capitalism on the one hand, and the fascist and fake-communist forms of state capitalism, on the other hand. But the whole thing came crashing down during the 1970s, when liberal capitalism profited from the structural weaknesses and geopolitical divisions of the Soviet bloc, and the ongoing, “jurisdictional” battles between rival political and trade-union bureaucracies in the developed world, to promote neoliberalism instead, over the past forty years or so.

Although a lot of people nowadays do not seem to know where neoliberalism came from, as the word suggests it was simply a return to the original economic and social liberalism, or laissez-faire, that had already been adopted during the nineteenth century. Therefore, summing up the entire history of capitalism, all this meant that private capitalism was originally called into being by the empire-building absolute monarchies in Europe during the mercantilist period, then it took over most of the Western imperialist countries during the period from 1789 to about 1885 (classical liberalism, under various constitutional disguises). After which it then transferred back to a milder form of mercantilism (neomercantilism) from 1885 to 1973, the year in which military dictator Augusto Pinochet inaugurated a new period of history by inviting the “Chicago boys” to run the Chilean economy. Which initiated the recent return to a much more nineteenth-century, laissez-faire approach, currently known as neoliberalism, but which has also engendered an increasingly anti-liberal, anti-globalization, right-wing populist (neofascist) reaction as well.

Getting back to the significance of the 75th anniversary commemorations of the D-day invasion, it is this victory of both neoliberalism and neofascism together, from the 1970s to the present, that ultimately puts the final nail in the coffin of the official Western interpretation of the Second World War, according to which D-day brought about a post-war transformation of world politics toward liberal democracy. What is particularly interesting in this most recent period is the fact that neoliberalism is not genuinely democratic at all, but instead concentrates on reconstructing and reinforcing the ultra-elitist focus of classical economic liberalism, thereby repudiating “democratic capitalism” altogether.

As such, it functions as a disguised (“fake-news”) version of right-wing populism, officially opposed to the more straightforward racism and sexism of authoritarian neofascism, but still mistreating most women and minority peoples anyway, since those groups of people always tend to be over-represented among the poorer sections of each national population. It turns out that neoliberalism and neofascism are just two discreet points on the same spectrum of reactionary political stances adopted nowadays by most private-capitalist and state-capitalist investors, all over the world. An observation that is confirmed by the fact that every right-wing populist, authoritarian, neofascist regime in today’s world always adopts neoliberalism as the dominant ideology governing its economic and social policies.

The closely-aligned nature of neoliberalism and neofascism in the current period of history was certainly foreshadowed during the  neomercantilist period, when the theoretically liberal countries profited from both the First and the Second World Wars to impose “temporary totalitarianism” during wartime, which gave them the militarily useless opportunity (among other things) to incarcerate large numbers of recent immigrants, as “enemy nationals”, because they had previously emigrated from regions governed by the “aggressor nations”.

During the Great Depression (1929-1939), the same temporary totalitarianism was also used quite often in theoretically liberal countries, such as in the USA’s extremely reactionary treatment of World War I veterans protesting against the lack of jobs. Even during the more liberal “thirty glorious years” after World War II, whenever the people in power found it necessary they also “temporarily” rescinded all the usual human rights, such as during the anti-Vietnam war protests (as became evident during incidents like the Kent State shootings in 1970). As Bertrand Russell famously pointed out several decades ago, “in a democracy, you have your rights until you need them”.

Over the past forty years of neoliberalism, temporary liberal tolerance of strong labour movements and welfare-state policies were abandoned, quickly in some cases and more gradually in others, in favour of an internationally coordinated assault on anything that smacked of “communism”. Communism being defined, in this case, as any situation whatsoever that interfered with short-term (quarter-year) profit maximization. This began in a huge way with the decade (1979-1989) of the “war on inflation”, the very rapid quadrupling of interest rates imposed on the “liberal-democratic” part of the world, that successfully eliminated the 1970s inflation crisis (caused, among other things, by an OPEC-initiated quadrupling of world petroleum prices). In its place, the neoliberal central banks imposed a world recession instead, that became particularly virulent between 1979 and 1981.

Following that enormous shock, it was relatively easy to impose a restrictive fiscal policy on all incomes except those of extremely rich people, who were treated to a much more liberal policy than ever before. Resulting, inevitably, in today’s unprecedentedly enormous income gap between the world’s social classes. During recent decades, world-wide globalization and (initially) relatively high levels of unemployment, coupled with the total capitulation of all the social-democratic parties, and the almost complete elimination of most of the world’s communist parties, led to the imposition of neoliberal austerity programs almost everywhere. Thereby rolling back most of the “welfare-state” provisions of the previous period of history.

Those countries still ruled by an official “communist” party abandoned any genuinely communist content that they may have possessed at one time, running those state-capitalist countries (such as the People’s Republic of China), as if those entire nations were just so many giant private corporations. Even government-owned corporations in the still officially democratic countries, such as Hydro-Québec, increasingly run their own “sovereign” empires using a similar kind of short-term profit-maximization. Governments all over the world have become increasingly incapable of providing any of the public services previously furnished to ordinary people, their own tax bases being severely undermined by the enormously expanded use of legal and illegal tax evasion, as well as the relatively tax-free super-profits granted to the newer technological giants, such as Facebook and Netflix.

All of which immediately led to an almost world-wide, ultra-right-wing populist (neofascist) reaction, hundreds of millions of people in dozens of different countries lashing out against their enormous loss of purchasing power, and their previously established conviction, now lost forever, that their children would henceforth be living even better than they were. Populist demagogues like Donald Trump and Marine LePen succeeded in convincing millions of new followers, who used to support the Democratic Party in the USA, or the Socialist and Communist Parties in France, that they were going to make their respective countries great again, by cleaning up the “liberal swamp” of free-trade globalization.

Instead of doing that, however, all those neofascist movements and governments, not only in various other parts of the Western world (Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, etc.), as well as in countries as diverse as China, Russia, India, Myanmar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Brazil, Honduras, the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, and so on and so forth, simply adopted a totally “fake-news” stance. In which the enormous difference between what they pretend to be doing, and what they actually succeed in doing, is in reality even more considerably pronounced than the similar gap between liberal-democratic pretensions and their own limited realizations. So far as I can tell, there is no country in the world today, nor any religion, nor any political ideology, that operates on anywhere near an honest projection of its own capabilities. All the important political stances currently dominating the entire world are completely bankrupt. Which, to say the least, does not bode all that well for the future of humanity.

Vladimir Putin’s recent declaration about the final demise of liberalism, and its replacement all over the world with various different kinds of authoritarianism, should not, therefore, be seen as a step forward. If all the countries in the world that are still officially liberal-minded, such as Germany, France and Canada, abandoned liberalism forever and become just as authoritarian as most of the other countries have become, there would not be any reason for any non-elitist commoner to celebrate. The total disappearance of free speech and free assembly would simply turn the entire world into a disgusting disaster of dystopia, in which all dissidents would either be jailed for a long time, or killed outright.

Unfortunately for all of us, neoliberalism and neofascism are plunging the world into crisis after crisis, characterized by severe economic instability, extreme social divisions, increasingly dangerous geopolitical confrontations, increasingly irrational attitudes toward vaccination against highly infectious diseases and constantly accelerating environmental degradation. Most frustrating of all, whenever childish people hear any rational argument about anything at all, they have a psychopathic tendency to become even more irrational than they were before.

When the natural world becomes so incredibly polluted by all this pretension and deliberate distortion, that it is no longer capable of putting up with human beings any more, it will no longer be possible for us to breath, or to drink, or to eat, or to defend ourselves against pathogens, in the horribly hot swamp that our illustrious leaders will have succeeded in creating. Rendering all the enormous sacrifices that our predecessors made back in the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the cold war, totally useless after all. Which is not exactly what the official organizers of the D-day commemorations had in mind when they talked about the legacy of the 1945 victories over fascism.