Re: Thinking for ourselves: Remembering World War II

[sartesian <sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

His description of the memorial sounded as though tis creators
wanted to build amonument to power rather than a just struggle
against the fascists.

Joel Wendland
----------------------------


And that is exactly why the memorial is so appropriate to the struggle-
because it was NOT  just "a just struggle against fascists, but a struggle
for power.

Before we go all misty eyed about Memorial Day and the 60th anniversary of
D-Day, we should be clear about the real price paid by the real people prior
to and during this struggle for power:  the war was the result of the defeat
of the working class revolutionary struggles from 1926 forward throughout
Asia, Europe, and the Americas.  And not the least of these was the defeat
of the Left Opposition inside the USSR.

Whereas Saint Just supposedly said "Those who make revolutions halfway
merely dig their own graves," the truth of the 20s and 30s is that the
arrested "half revolution" initiated by the destruction of the Russian
bourgeoisie, dug the graves of lots of others, those same workers inside and
outside the USSR.

At every moment the war is a struggle for power . Justice has nothing to do
with it, west or east. It is the destruction of the producers and conditions
of production initiated by capital.

Militarily, the "liberation of Europe," begins not with D-Day, but a year
earlier with the Battle of Kursk when the Red Army (let's hear it for
Vatutin, Katukov, Rotmistrov, but especially Vatutin) absorbed everything
Model's, Hauser's, Kempf's, Hoth's Panzer Armies, and SS Panzer Armies,
could project in their Operation Citadel, and then immediately turned the
Red Army to the offensive along the entire front from the Black to the
Baltic Seas.  That victory was made possible by the enduring strength of the
unfinished revolution, the collectivized production organization.  The cost
too was paid by the legacy, living and material, of the Russian Revolution.
Only that made US/UK landings in Sicily, Italy, and eventually Normandy
viable and "worth the cost.".