“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.