# [Sunday 11 November]The Unpatriotic History of the Second World War



## Jean-Luc (Oct 29, 2012)

James Heathfield introduces his new book _The Unpatriotic History of the Second World War_ in which he argues that the Second World War was just as much as the First World War a conflict, on both sides, between rival imperialist powers for a re-division of the world and not, as popularly portrayed, a "people's war" of "democracy" against "fascism". He shows that this was just the ideological smokescreen to disguise the imperialist economic and strategic interests that were the real issue.

Both sides screwed down their working class ,regimenting them and reducing their living standards. Both sides committed atrocities. After the German conquest of Europe, for the first few years the war was fought in Africa (they've just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the battle of El Alemain), the Middle East and Asia as the dominant imperialist powers fought to defend their empires. When the war did spread to Europe again the winning powers installed regimes favourable to their interests in what Heartfield describes as "the second invasion of Europe".

Come and hear James Heartfield develop these arguments at 6pm on 11 November. Venue: Socialist Party premises, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN (nearest tube: Clapham North)


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## Quartz (Oct 29, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> After the German conquest of Europe, for the first few years the war was fought in Africa


 
So the Blitz didn't happen, eh? Nor the Battle of Britain? Nor the Battle of the Atlantic? And of which atrocities were the British and Americans guilty?


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 29, 2012)

Quartz said:


> So the Blitz didn't happen, eh? Nor the Battle of Britain? Nor the Battle of the Atlantic?


OK, I should have specified I was talking about the war on land.


> And of which atrocities were the British and Americans guilty?


Chapter 26 of Heartfield's book "A War of Extermination in the Pacific" lists a number of atrocities committed by US (and Australian) troops:


> Allied troops regularly beat, tortured and killed captured Japanese. One academic who had been with the army in Okinawa and Peluliu remembered GIs taking Japanese body parts and gold teeth, and urinating on the dead, as well as shooting defenceless old women. Edgar Jones, who was War Correspondent of the_ Atlantic Weekly_ wrote in February 1946: "We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific, boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."


Heartfield also recounts how the British authorities provoked the Bengal Famine of 1943, in which 3 and a half million died, by a policy of destroying rice crops to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Japanese army and their allies in the Indian National Army (Indians fighting alongside the Japanese and who enjoyed considerable popularity in India, particularly Bengal). Then there was Bomber Harris's bombing campaign against German civilians.


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## Quartz (Oct 29, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> Chapter 26 of Heartfield's book "A War of Extermination in the Pacific" lists a number of atrocities committed by US (and Australian) troops:


 
Are these just accusations, attested by multiple sources, or were there convictions? 



> Heartfield also recounts how the British authorities provoked the Bengal Famine of 1943, in which 3 and a half million died, by a policy of destroying rice crops to prevent them falling into the hands of the advancing Japanese army and their allies in the Indian National Army (Indians fighting alongside the Japanese and who enjoyed considerable popularity in India, particularly Bengal).


 
Scorched Earth is a standard tactic going back millennia. Civilians always suffer in war, and the British would not have destroyed the crops if the Japanese had not been advancing, so you can blame that one on the Japanese.

I wasn't aware that the INA were particularly popular in India, being basically a tool of the Japanese. And it was mainly the Indians who defeated the Japanese at Imphal.



> Then there was Bomber Harris's bombing campaign against German civilians.


 
I know that's an emotive subject but I don't believe that was either an atrocity or a war crime.


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 29, 2012)

Quartz said:


> Are these just accusations, attested by multiple sources, or were there convictions?


Heathfield gives as his sources these two books:

John W. Dower, _War Without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War_.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor.../American-troops-murdered-Japanese-PoWs.html#


Convictions? You must be joking. American imperialism defeated Japanese imperialism in the Pacific and victorious powers don't put their own troops on trial, just those of the defeated enemy.



> Scorched Earth is a standard tactic going back millennia. Civilians always suffer in war, and the British would not have destroyed the crops if the Japanese had not been advancing, so you can blame that one on the Japanese.


Well, whatever the position, the scorched earth policy was carried out not to defend "democracy" but to retain British imperialism's control of India. No doubt the sacrifice of three-and-a-half million Bengalis was considered a price worth paying for this. If that wasn't an atrocity, what was?



> I wasn't aware that the INA were particularly popular in India, being basically a tool of the Japanese. And it was mainly the Indians who defeated the Japanese at Imphal.


The INA may well have been tools of Japanese imperialism but the Indians fighting with the British Army were equally the tools of British imperialism. That's what the war in that part of the world was all about, a clash of rival imperialisms, as Heartfield contends.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 29, 2012)

Quartz said:


> Are these just accusations, attested by multiple sources, or were there convictions?


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## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

FDR was presented with a letter opener made from one of the rib bones of a dead "Jap". He politely returned it.

As for the war being either imperialist or anti-fascist, surely it was both?

Heartfield is one of the loons around the RCP/Living Marxism/Spiked, also.


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## likesfish (Oct 29, 2012)

Because it only became a Glorious fight against Facism when the warrior gods of the red army got involved and they spread freedom and socialism where ever they went.
 didnt murder poles dump them in a forest
watch the poles die fighting the germans in warsaw
 go on a rape orgy across eastern europe.
 Hang around for near  fifty years being unwanted guests


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## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

likesfish said:


> Because it only became a Glorious fight against Facism when the warrior gods of the red army got involved and they spread freedom and socialism where ever they went.
> didnt murder poles dump them in a forest
> watch the poles die fighting the germans in warsaw
> go on a rape orgy across eastern europe.
> Hang around for near fifty years being unwanted guests


 
Well your lads hung around India and sundry other countries (cough, Ireland, cough) being unwanted guests for more than a century, so. . .

What you say about Ivan is true though -  but he was still preferable to Fritz.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 29, 2012)

likesfish said:


> Because it only became a Glorious fight against Facism when the warrior gods of the red army got involved and they spread freedom and socialism where ever they went.
> didnt murder poles dump them in a forest
> watch the poles die fighting the germans in warsaw
> go on a rape orgy across eastern europe.
> Hang around for near fifty years being unwanted guests


 
There was of course General Andrei Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army.  Stalin had him hanged though.


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## likesfish (Oct 29, 2012)

Yes but we had to do that to er civillise the savages and teach them cricket build railways and genrally improve the place you know what its like getting the builders in.
 And in no way loot the place silly  thats a vile slander and all those dead bodies nasty spot of flu obviously


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## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> There was of course General Andrei Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army. *Stalin had him hanged though.*


 
Kharashoh.


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## Idris2002 (Oct 29, 2012)

The wee girl I share an office with is half Polish. Like everyone else of Polish extraction that I've ever met, she talks about Katyn as if it was yesterday.


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## Bakunin (Oct 29, 2012)

Quartz said:


> Scorched Earth is a standard tactic going back millennia.


 
Perfectly true. It's long been standard practice for a retreating army to destroy absolutely anything that would be useful to the enemy. Food stocks, munitions dumps, vehicles, medical supplies, hospitals, barracks, airfields, weapons, docks, railways, stations, roads, bridges, everything that could be useful in enemy hands is either sabotaged, blown up, burnt, poisoned or otherwise rendered useless. In a desert climate even water sources such as wells, lakes, ponds and rivers are routinely poisoned by dumping rubbish and carcasses (animal or human or both, whatever's available) because it forces the advancing enemy to constantly resupply water instead of delivering more weapons, troops, vehicles or munitions.

'Scorched Earth' is a standard military tactic and has been for centuries, it's nothing more than that unless it's used against the civilian population as some form of collective punishment or reprisal. To a retreating army, anything that might be useful to the enemy is simply considered fair game.


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 30, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> FDR was presented with a letter opener made from one of the rib bones of a dead "Jap". He politely returned it.
> As for the war being either imperialist or anti-fascist, surely it was both?
> Heartfield is one of the loons around the RCP/Living Marxism/Spiked, also.


Yes of course it was both, at least on one of the sides. What else but "anti-fascism", ie. opposition to the attempts by German imperialism and Japanese imperialism to break-out of their economic confinement to find markets and gain access to sources of raw materials, could have united British imperialism (seeking to defend its Empire in India and Malaya), American imperialism (fighting with racially segregated armed forces) and Russian imperialism (with a regime even more totalitarian than Nazi Germany)? It certainly could not have been "democracy". In fact the propaganda that it was (that survives to this day) is so ridiculous that it is surprising that it should ever have been taken seriously.

Heathfield is in fact expressing a position that was held at the time by the Communist Party (until 22 June 1941), the ILP, the SPGB, anarchists and some Trotskyists (throughout the war). It is a respectable position that deserves a hearing, especially as the government is now preparing to "celebrate" the centenary of the First Imperialist World War (of which in fact the Second World War can be seen as a continuation).


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## ayatollah (Oct 30, 2012)

I would have thought most of this stuff, for anyone vaguely Left of Ed Miliband , is pretty standard fare by now. Though I fail to be particularly shocked by the undoubted summary shootings of Japanese prisoners by US soldiers. This happens in ALL theatres of war throughout history, but for the Axis miitary it was a Leadership enforced POLICY, whereas for the Allies the acts of individual soldiers and units.The typical US soldier was undoubtedly fired up by a welter of anti Japanese racist indoctrination during WWII - such as to produce the nowadays astonishing phenomenum of the widespread sending home of "Jap skulls" as "trophies" to loved ones ! This attitude was largely produced by the fear that highly motivated Japanese individual combat ferocity produced in the typical , pretty ideologically uncommitted, GI. The harsh fact is the majority of Japanese soldiery simply would't surrender, and many, many, pretended to surrender whilst concealing grenades. In the end the typical Allied soldier just shot em down wholesale.

It is simply a historical fact though that the (non aerial bombing related ) atrocities of the Japanese Imperial forces against both Allied soldiery and sundry civilian populations dwarf by a gigantic magnitude the crimes of the Allies. It's simply a fact.. the Japanese were a military/fascist regime, whereas the Allies were a Bourgeois Democratic entity -- and that actually did result in significant differences in operational behaviour vis a vis local populations and prisoners, etc. This didn't of course stop the US firebombing Tokyo , etc.and dropping 2 nukes, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, so the differences in total bodycount are not as large overall as the more "humane" battlefield prisoner practices of the Allies might suggest. Count in Japanese atrocities in China though and the Japanese Empire is WELL ahead in the total murder bodycount.

The aspect I always find more interesting, because it is generally more covered in a very deep pile of ideological bullshit, is the role of the USA, both up to and in WWI and up to , in, and after WWII. In the UK at least we still have a generally popular collective view of the USA throughout the 20th century as our very bestest, bestest pal. Whereas in reality throughout the early years of the 20th century the world naval arms race in particular was as much between the USA and the British Empire, as with Germany and Japan and France.

Certainly the long term hegemonic interests/ambitions of the USA in Latin America ( eg, the Monroe Doctrine), and its ever increasing economic hegemonic sphere of interest ambitions in the Pacific rim, always put it on a potential collision course with the British Empire quite as much as the Japanese Empire. Behind all the "we are inseparable blood cousins" bullshit from Churchill during WWII, he was always well aware that the USA fully intended to bleed the British Empire dry of its gold reserves , and was setting the scene for the post WWII collapse of the British Empire colonial possessions in its intended future "Grand Area" of hegemony, before it offered any significant support against the Axis powers.

The "decolonisation" propaganda of the USA was always predicated on the real intention to create, via its growing world economic and military dominance, a new form of global imperialism...a US Imperial world order, without formal colonial domination, but instead domination via free trade, finance and the support/installation of puppet pro-US Imperialist governments.

For most of the post WWII 20th century of course US Imperialism's topdog role and excuse for intervention all over the world was justified by its lead role as capitalism's attack dog against "Communism". Communism (in it's Stalinist perverted form) was an absolute accidental gift ideologically and strategically throughout the high water mark period of US Imperialism's world hegemony. If it hadn't existed they'd have had to invest it. Attempting to elevate the "menace" of a handful of Islamic fundamentalists to the same bogyman status as the Red Menace -- such as to justify the entire apparatus of US dominance and military intervention across the USA's "Grand Area" , just hasn't worked so well. Only Tony Blair really believed in the "War against Terror".


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## likesfish (Oct 30, 2012)

The blokes a cunt basicilly the communist party had this view until hitler back stabbed his bff.
 The nazis really were the ultimate bad guys.
 The japense were pretty evil as well .

Tbf killing 2996 people in a single attack is going to bring a massive response especailly against a country that wasnt at war


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 31, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> Though I fail to be particularly shocked by the undoubted summary shootings of Japanese prisoners by US soldiers. This happens in ALL theatres of war throughout history, but for the Axis miitary it was a Leadership enforced POLICY, whereas for the Allies the acts of individual soldiers and units.


I think the evidence is that this was official US policy in the Pacific War. No plans were made for Japanese POWs and few were taken. There was also an element of racism in the US policy. Although their war against Japan was over control of the eastern Pacific and its resources, markets and investment outlets it was portrayed as a war against the sub-human "Japs" who could be killed just because they were subhuman (and had dared to mistreat Europeans as Europeans had traditionally treated "Asiatics" who stood up to them). Note also that Nazi Germany did not have a policy of systematically killing enemy soldiers. It appears that the "rules of war" were only regarded as applicable amongst Europeans.



> It is simply a historical fact though that the (non aerial bombing related ) atrocities of the Japanese Imperial forces against both Allied soldiery and sundry civilian populations dwarf by a gigantic magnitude the crimes of the Allies. It's simply a fact.. the Japanese were a military/fascist regime, whereas the Allies were a Bourgeois Democratic entity -- and that actually did result in significant differences in operational behaviour vis a vis local populations and prisoners, etc.


True (but the Bengal Famine in which 3.5 million died must rate high on the list of the atrocities of the Second World War), but why? Why were Britain, America and France "bourgeois democracies" and Germany and Japan dictatorships? Surely because British, American and French imperialisms had already divided the world amongst themselves and were the dominant powers, the top dogs, the alpha-males of world imperialism . Any power challenging their hegemony, as Germany and Japan, deprived of access to markets and sources of raw materials, were obliged by economic necessity to do had to be the aggressors and employed more violent and brutal methods. The German and Japanese dictatorships were the opposite side of the coin to the "bourgeois democracies". You can't just isolate them and treat them as a special case due, for instance, to the nasty character of Germans and Japanese. It was the whole world imperialist system that was responsible for the Second (as well as the First) World War.


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## ayatollah (Oct 31, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> I think the evidence is that this was official US policy in the Pacific War. No plans were made for Japanese POWs and few were taken. There was also an element of racism in the US policy. Although their war against Japan was over control of the eastern Pacific and its resources, markets and investment outlets it was portrayed as a war against the sub-human "Japs" who could be killed just because they were subhuman (and had dared to mistreat Europeans as Europeans had traditionally treated "Asiatics" who stood up to them). Note also that Nazi Germany did not have a policy of systematically killing enemy soldiers. It appears that the "rules of war" were only regarded as applicable amongst Europeans.
> 
> True (but the Bengal Famine in which 3.5 million died must rate high on the list of the atrocities of the Second World War), but why? Why were Britain, America and France "bourgeois democracies" and Germany and Japan dictatorships? Surely because British, American and French imperialisms had already divided the world amongst themselves and were the dominant powers, the top dogs, the alpha-males of world imperialism . Any power challenging their hegemony, as Germany and Japan, deprived of access to markets and sources of raw materials, were obliged by economic necessity to do had to be the aggressors and employed more violent and brutal methods. The German and Japanese dictatorships were the opposite side of the coin to the "bourgeois democracies". You can't just isolate them and treat them as a special case due, for instance, to the nasty character of Germans and Japanese. It was the whole world imperialist system that was responsible for the Second (as well as the First) World War.


 
Yes I entirely agree with you. Whilst we need to acknowledge the particular savagery of Axis militarism/fascism during WWII it is all to easy to discount the ruthless undoubted brutality of the Allied powers. eg,The extraordionary destructiveness of the Allied advance across Europe following D-Day is something we in Britain remain especially blind to -- "Liberation" for all too many French, Dutch, Belgian, citizens, meant being blown to smithereens under Allied bombing to dislodge stubborn pockets of German resistance !

It is also, as you say, all too easy to be appalled by the undoubted atavistic savagery of the rising competitor capitalist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) trying to break into the closed imperial colonial system dominated by Great Britain , France, the Dutch - and then forget the extraordinarily brutal historical background to the creation of these empires, stretching over centuries . from the slave trade, to the conquest , and systematic deindustrialisation, of India, the Irish famines, the rape of Africa, etc. If one was to do a crude "murder bodycount" the deathtoll behind the formation and maintenance of the British and other European empires(and the capital base on which ALL of us in the UK and France and Holland today to a certain extent benefit, across all classes) would exceed all the murder bodycounts achieved by, Stalinism, Japanese militarism, Nazism.

No, WWII was not a war for "freedom" and "Liberation of peoples". Nevertheless if the Axis powers had won, which they might well have done throughout Europe and Asia (The USA would almost certainly have survived in a long term standoff with the Japanese Empire) today a Nazi dominated Europe/Russian landmass would be some sort of nightmare exterminatory totalitarian Slave State. Bourgeois Democracy is undoubtedly a facade for capitalist rule.. but we need to remember its still a lot, lot, better than living (or usually dying) under Nazism !


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## DotCommunist (Oct 31, 2012)

Idris2002 said:


> The wee girl I share an office with is half Polish. Like everyone else of Polish extraction that I've ever met, she talks about Katyn as if it was yesterday.


 

I read it was one bloke who shot all those officers. over the space of a week. How he ever slept again...


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 31, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> No, WWII was not a war for "freedom" and "Liberation of peoples". Nevertheless if the Axis powers had won, which they might well have done throughout Europe and Asia (The USA would almost certainly have survived in a long term standoff with the Japanese Empire) today a Nazi dominated Europe/Russian landmass would be some sort of nightmare exterminatory totalitarian Slave State. Bourgeois Democracy is undoubtedly a facade for capitalist rule.. but we need to remember its still a lot, lot, better than living (or usually dying) under Nazism !


Interesting speculation but I suggest a more realistic scenario would have been: a peace deal in 1940 or 1941 between Britain and Germany, leaving Germany dominant in Europe and Britain to keep its Empire. There is some evidence that sections of the British ruling class were tempted by this. In conditions of peace, the German ruling class would no longer have any use for Hitler and would have got rid of him one way or another. A period of de-hitlerisation (even de-nazification) would have followed. So many Jews would not have been exterminated. In any event a modern capitalist economy cannot be run for any length of time as a "totaliarian Slave State" (as the Russian ruling class eventually discovered) so that couldn't have lasted, certainly not until "today". There'd have been a European Economic Union 20 or so years before it actually came about. In the East,Indonesia, Malaya and the countries of Indo-China would have got independence earlier than they did.

But this is all more or less idle speculation. What happened happened.


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## Lock&Light (Oct 31, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> No plans were made for Japanese POWs and few were taken.


 
The Japanese attitude to being taken prisoner was clearly reflected in the way they treated those allied soldiers who surrendered, so the fact that there were no plans made for Japanese POWs should be seen in that light.


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## editor (Oct 31, 2012)

In short: war is brutal, dehumanising and leads to horrendous acts of brutality being committed against soldiers and civilians alike. That's what war is. Fucking horrible. Always.


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## likesfish (Oct 31, 2012)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japane...n_World_War_II#Prisoners_taken_during_the_war

There were pow camps and plans were made to handle pows the red cross was informed of pows the japenese goverment refused to acknowledge the exsistance of japanese prisoners.

US forces had to be bribed with ice cream to keeps prisoners alive though
 The japanese were very fanatical though if they did surrender often broke down completely.


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## ayatollah (Oct 31, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> Interesting speculation but I suggest a more realistic scenario would have been: a peace deal in 1940 or 1941 between Britain and Germany, leaving Germany dominant in Europe and Britain to keep its Empire. There is some evidence that sections of the British ruling class were tempted by this. In conditions of peace, the German ruling class would no longer have any use for Hitler and would have got rid of him one way or another. A period of de-hitlerisation (even de-nazification) would have followed. So many Jews would not have been exterminated. In any event a modern capitalist economy cannot be run for any length of time as a "totaliarian Slave State" (as the Russian ruling class eventually discovered) so that couldn't have lasted, certainly not until "today". There'd have been a European Economic Union 20 or so years before it actually came about. In the East,Indonesia, Malaya and the countries of Indo-China would have got independence earlier than they did.
> 
> But this is all more or less idle speculation. What happened happened.


 
I think this is a common, very complacent, but fundamental and serious misunderstanding of the immense transformational power of the ideology and operational practices of German Nazism. Italian and Spanish Fascism is a very, very, different thing to the SS Nazi state which had emerged by WWII. The German capitalist class had definitely lost real state power to the Nazi Party and state elite by 1940. A showdown with the traditional German capitalist class and its Army/Navy class representatives would almost certainly have arisen at some stage if the Germans had ended up dominating the Western European and Eastern European landmasses,. But the idea that the German/European capitalist class could simply have "dispensed with " the services of its Nazi goonsquads when they were no longer "needed" , and found to be economically inefficient, is a dangerous misunderstanding of the power of Nazism. Nazism has/had the potential to immoveably capture the entire European capitalist state/s and set the overrarching ideological agenda for its supporting/acquiescing populations in all classes - and drive it in an entirely new , undoubtedly irrational and inefficient Totalitarian Industrial Slave State mode of production direction. Not only would this SS State have exterminated ALL the Jews in Europe, and the Middle East, it would have exterminated all those with any slight Jewish ancestry, plus a large part of the indigenous populations of the Eurasian landmass - via "extermination through (slave) labour" and simple mass extermination as a permanent tool of SS state terror and the creation of the "lebensraum" strategy of creating empty land for German colonisation .

The orthodox Trotskyist idea of Nazism being identical with all other manifestations of "fascism", and both as simply a trivial surface confidence trick by the capitalist class, a short term stunt to smash the workers movement, before returning to business as usual, is simply wrong. Nazism is potentially a genuine "third way" distinct from bourgeois capitalism, just as the Nazis claim. The Allied forces invading Europe were not only smashing Nazism.. but rescuing the European Capitalist class from the crazed "fascist Tiger" they had so unwisely mounted up on in the 20's and 30's.

I'm pretty sure that the European capitalist class, if not the Left, have learnt this lesson, and in places like the current Greek crisis the capitalist class will be VERY careful to try and keep the rising fascist movement firmly in check, kept to being "the hired goonsquad help" if necessary behind a military takeover if the social crisis point of "dual power" with the working class emerges. There will be no unconditional handing over of the entire state machine to the Nazi madmen this time round if the capitalist classes have any choices at all in the matter, But will they ? That's the unknown question.


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## Jean-Luc (Oct 31, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> Nazism has/had the potential to immoveably capture the entire European capitalist state/s and set the overrarching ideological agenda for its supporting/acquiescing populations in all classes - and drive it in an entirely new , undoubtedly irrational and inefficient Totalitarian Industrial Slave State mode of production direction.





> Nazism is potentially a genuine "third way" distinct from bourgeois capitalism, just as the Nazis claim.


If you were talking about the 1930s you might have had some sort of a case for this claim, but not today. "Nazism", and its programme of a "totalitarian Industrial Slave State mode of production" as you put, has no chance whatsoever of coming into being again in modern country. It is not even advocated by the parties that are labelled "fascist" that enjoy some electoral support today. Nazism was a product of the particular historical circumstances that capitalist Germany found itself in in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of its defeat in the First World War (hemmed in by the other capitalist powers and denied access to markets and sources of raw materials, to which it could only gain access by a policy aggression and so with a war economy). As the product of specific historical conditions that no longer apply, it is not something that is at all likely to be repeated today. Nazism has been and gone. In any event, a modern capitalist economy, depending on an educated and self-motivated workforce, simply cannot be run as a slave economy.

The much more likely form that any "return to the 30s" would take would be a return to a narrow economic nationalism with countries trying to compete against each other through protectionism and tariffs, competitive devaluations, quotas, etc as happened then. This is a policy favoured by the Left as well as the Right, both calling for their country to, for example, withraw from the EU so they can do this. Which does seem to be gaining in popularity even if it is not what the dominant section of the capitalist class in any country wants.


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## likesfish (Oct 31, 2012)

Nazism was terribly well thought out adolfs response to some one whineing about his local party was take it over by force


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## ayatollah (Oct 31, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> If you were talking about the 1930s you might have had some sort of a case for this claim, but not today. "Nazism", and its programme of a "totalitarian Industrial Slave State mode of production" as you put, has no chance whatsoever of coming into being again in modern country. It is not even advocated by the parties that are labelled "fascist" that enjoy some electoral support today. Nazism was a product of the particular historical circumstances that capitalist Germany found itself in in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of its defeat in the First World War (hemmed in by the other capitalist powers and denied access to markets and sources of raw materials, to which it could only gain access by a policy aggression and so with a war economy). As the product of specific historical conditions that no longer apply, it is not something that is at all likely to be repeated today. Nazism has been and gone. In any event, a modern capitalist economy, depending on an educated and self-motivated workforce, simply cannot be run as a slave economy.
> 
> The much more likely form that any "return to the 30s" would take would be a return to a narrow economic nationalism with countries trying to compete against each other through protectionism and tariffs, competitive devaluations, quotas, etc as happened then. This is a policy favoured by the Left as well as the Right, both calling for their country to, for example, withraw from the EU so they can do this. Which does seem to be gaining in popularity even if it is not what the dominant section of the capitalist class in any country wants.


 
I've already stated that the experience of their impotence in the face of the German Nazi takeover in the 30's has made the capitalist class very unwilling to go down this route again - even if faced in the future with mass revolt bythe working class. (read the end of my last post). You do however appear to concede to my analysis of the special emerging aberration of an "industrial Slave State" that the victories of German Nazism represented on the Eurasian Landmass during WWII. I am not for a moment claiming that the exterminatory totalitarian Nazi state that would have emerged across Eurasia if the Nazis had won the European part of WWII would have been a rational, efficient, mode of production . It wouldn't have. The point is that under Nazism, the "ideological superstructure" of exterminatory racism and dictatorship was in the driving seat, and no one , certainly not the capitalist class were in a position to deflect it from its own crazed path of destruction. This is not unique in history.. the completely crazed , murderous disasters of Collectivisation, The Great Leap Forward, and The Cultural Revolution, under the Chinese Mao dictatorship provides another example of the totalitarian state set up allowing the sheer crazed ideological fantasy of a mistaken belief system to drive an entire society in a completely self-destructve direction.

You seem to have retreated from your earlier extraordinary complacent claim that if only the British Ruling Class had cut a deal with Nazi Germany in circa 1940, after the fall of France, the German Ruling class would have taken its winnings (after next  conquering Russia presumeably ?) , got rid of the Nazis, spared the surviving Jews, and set up the EU a few years earlier !


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 31, 2012)

I would suggest you need to understand more about the Cultural Revolution especially before sounding off like you have done above.


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## ayatollah (Oct 31, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I would suggest you need to understand more about the Cultural Revolution especially before sounding off like you have done above.


 
I understand everything there is to know about the nightmare of the Cultural bloody Revolution you toy stalinist tit, Hurrah. Why don't you give us all a sick laugh with some sort of sad apologia for it ? Next up an appreciation of the greatly misunderstood achievements of Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot ?


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 1, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> You seem to have retreated from your earlier extraordinary complacent claim that if only the British Ruling Class had cut a deal with Nazi Germany in circa 1940, after the fall of France, the German Ruling class would have taken its winnings (after next conquering Russia presumeably ?) , got rid of the Nazis, spared the surviving Jews, and set up the EU a few years earlier !


It was only (likes yours) an idle speculation anyway put forward to offer a different possible outcome to your nightmare scenario. I have to admit, though, that your scenario proved accurate for the people of eastern Europe: they were incorporated into what you call a "Totalitarian Industrial Slave State" that dominated a large part of the Eurasian landmass for the following 45 years. I doubt if a Nazi Europe would have lasted that long as a "Totalitarian Industrial Slave State" as that would have been economically impossible. But we're back to idle speculation again.

In any event, the Second World War was an imperialist war whose outcome was going to be a re-division of the world amongst the imperialist powers, the specific carve-up depending on the outcome. We're just speculating about what the carve-up might have been had the Axis powers won. This didn't happen and the world was re-divided in the way it was, with the big gainers being Imperialist America and Imperialist Russia, with British and French imperialisms being relegated to the second division.


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 1, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> I understand everything there is to know about the nightmare of the Cultural bloody Revolution you toy stalinist tit, Hurrah. Why don't you give us all a sick laugh with some sort of sad apologia for it ? Next up an appreciation of the greatly misunderstood achievements of Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot ?


 
I am not a Stalinist. I see you've stopped using CAPITAL letters, though, which I guess is an improvement. Or perhaps you gained a little self-awareness. The only toy Stalinist on these boards is DotCommunist.

I don't see how the Cultural Revolution has similarities with what you've been talking about above. If you insist on being a pompous twat with an air of authority on threads then you should at least try to know a little about what you're talking about. I know your position seems largely to be what you learned by rote in an irrelevant Trotskyist sect when I was watching some posho with his hand up a puppet on the telly, but it also seems, like some western interpretations, to be informed by the Chinese Communist Party's attempt post-Mao to dominate how the CR and the collective era is remembered and its meaning - that is, 'ten years of chaos,' a decade of unbroken and constant bloodshed somehow orchestrated by one man, some kind of evil genius. It suited Deng, it suits you I suppose. Part of this is the encouragement in the publication of misery memoirs or 'scar literature' as a genre based on themes of terror and madness and the like.

You don't even seem to realise that the more bloody or 'chaotic' part of the CR with mass participation was only a small period within that decade, was but one aspect, and after three years with some cities resembling through street battles a break down into 'civil war,' the CPC had to bring in other state actors in order to put a brake on what had been unleashed from below. That is, frustrated millions with access to meaningful political participation for the first time. And we're going to have to delve into these contesting constituencies who grasped out for it, and how they experienced it. Within that, there is much to disappoint those quaint hardcore Maoists who still hold up the GPCR (they'd prefer that) as the furthest advance to communism yet seen, and ignorant muppets like yourself.

One very important and central aspect is the all too familiar cult of personality exported by the international Communist movement, but beneath the surface you'd need to examine how Mao's texts (he was a better writer than Stalin, and I bet you've read neither) and symbolism were used by the above to suit various agendas, interests, were subverted and manipulated. Brainwashing into living a fantasy didn't happen, rather people in oppressive and authoritarian societies like Maoist China resist their oppression and exploitation by using whatever is closest to hand, even that which is used by the powers that be to justify their dominance, including the official image of the Great Helmsman.

And what about DPRK and DK? Want to go down that road? And then get in a huff and call me a Stalinist?


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## ayatollah (Nov 1, 2012)

Slippery , slippery, but ultimately completely analysis-free stuff , Hurrah -  In the worthless bullshit above you've taken   no actual "position"  on the class nature of  Mao and his regime , or on the real class purposes and  impacts of the process called "the Cultural Revolution".  There is nothing meaningful that can actually  be deduced from your pompous verbiage. I repeat yet again. You are simply a slippery, dishonest, neo stalinist apologist, hiding behind  a disconnected series of excuses and straw men arguments. Pathetic, and contemptable.

There are plenty of  misguided people, particularly comfortable armchair "Marxists" (like Hurrah) safely distant from the horrors of the realities of Stalinism,  ready to argue  that Stalin was a great socialist leader, or , as a softer form of apologia, "not nearly as bad as western propaganda claims", and that the Great Famines caused by Collectivisation  were also just Western propaganda, as with the deaths in the Great Purges. There are also still plenty of people  also ready to maintain that Mao was also a great Socialist revolutionery, and that the "Cultural Revolution " was a genuine revolutionery socialist process.. The Trotskyist theory of  "Permament Revolution" in action ! In fact all of these mass murderous events were driven solely by the particular  tactical needs of these two  state capitalist class dictators seeking to further entrench (and in Mao's case recover lost personal power in the Communist bureaucracy after the disaster of "The Great Leap Forward") their personal and  collective bureaucratic class power on their societies, nothing more.

The *Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution*, commonly known as the *Cultural Revolution*  lasted from 1966 to 1969 in its main phase, but is often argued to have actually  continued in various forms until  1976.

The death toll, never mind those whose lives were simply ruined or disrupted,  in the chaotic "Cultural Revolution", is an issue of huge debate. Maoist apologists put it at about  5 people and a dog – crushed by accident  at a mass rally in 1968 possibly !  Other analysts  however are a bit more believable--- even if the totals are  highly controversial.: 

In _Mao's Last Revolution_ (2006), Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals assert that in rural China alone some 36 million people were persecuted, of whom between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, with roughly the same number permanently injured. In _Mao: The Unknown Story_, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday claim that as many as 3 million people died in the violence of the Cultural Revolution. Sociologist Daniel Chirot claims that around 100 million people suffered and at least one million people, and perhaps as many as 20 million, died in the Cultural Revolution.

Those, like Hurrah, who try to bury these ghastly human costs in a welter of pseudo academic double talk and obstruse debate about multi layer complex processes, etc,  simply piss on the graves of the millions of dead, and soil the cause of Revolutionery Socialism, by their failure to take a firm stand against the aberrant counter revolutionery political/class system known as "Stalinism", which is the gravedigger of working class revolutionery self emancipation, not a varient of "Socialism" or "genuine "Communism".


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## Random (Nov 1, 2012)

So far I've found out that Ayatollah doesn't like Capt hurrah and that he's exposed Mao as a Stalinist. I await further revelations


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 1, 2012)

ayatollah said:


> Slippery , slippery, but ultimately completely analysis-free stuff , Hurrah - In the worthless bullshit above you've taken no actual "position" on the class nature of Mao and his regime , or on the real class purposes and impacts of the process called "the Cultural Revolution". There is nothing meaningful that can actually be deduced from your pompous verbiage. I repeat yet again. You are simply a slippery, dishonest, neo stalinist apologist, hiding behind a disconnected series of excuses and straw men arguments. Pathetic, and contemptable.
> 
> There are plenty of misguided people, particularly comfortable armchair "Marxists" (like Hurrah) safely distant from the horrors of the realities of Stalinism, ready to argue that Stalin was a great socialist leader, or , as a softer form of apologia, "not nearly as bad as western propaganda claims", and that the Great Famines caused by Collectivisation were also just Western propaganda, as with the deaths in the Great Purges. There are also still plenty of people also ready to maintain that Mao was also a great Socialist revolutionery, and that the "Cultural Revolution " was a genuine revolutionery socialist process.. The Trotskyist theory of "Permament Revolution" in action ! In fact all of these mass murderous events were driven solely by the particular tactical needs of these two state capitalist class dictators seeking to further entrench (and in Mao's case recover lost personal power in the Communist bureaucracy after the disaster of "The Great Leap Forward") their personal and collective bureaucratic class power on their societies, nothing more.
> 
> ...


 
Your source/s are Halliday and Chang! Not only that, but from Wikipedia! No wonder you're woefully ignorant. I've read the co-authored MacFarquhar and Schoenhals book. You haven't. And how can you tell me about the real class nature, purposes and 'process' of the CR, when you seem unaware of the varying social bases of Red Guard organisation and action, and their competing objectives vis-a-vis the CPC leadership?

And nowhere have I said that the CR was a 'genuine socialist revolutionary process.' I don't think of it in those terms, never have done, and I'm guessing when you say that, you're within the confines of your crude by the numbers Leninism. I'm saying that the flood of violence (not 'revolutionary activity' despite what the participants thought themselves) is rooted in earlier government class-based policies which affected millions, and that the violence, its direction etc, was more than just an evil scheme cooked up by a handful of people in 1966 Beijing or Shanghai, as you seem to think. As I said earlier, when the dam burst and the ensuing flood was seen as too threatening, the CPC had to bring in the PLA. Good to see that you grudgingly acknowledged that with your talk of a 'main phase.'

Surely, as a REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST at Visteon, you would be more inclined to jettison whatever purely moralistic condemnation you have adopted about Mao-era China, the failure to establish a socialist society during that time, or the man himself. For example, Mao was responsible for allowing mass death, but was never a mass 'murderer.' Responsibility can certainly be placed at someone's door even though they did not have death as their central or stated aim. But nevertheless, these people took decisions from a position of considerable authority, and did so on the basis of knowing that those decisions carried a risk of outcomes including death, and then did nothing or didn't intervene enough once those consequences had begun to show themselves.

Take the GLF. To understand it and its consequences, is it more fruitful to look at the conditions of the country at the time and its under-development, an inadequately resourced Leninist government with partially 'proven' Soviet models for remedying it along with the distinct voluntarism offered by Maoist thought, the position of China in the world re the major capitalist powers, and the Party's relationship with the peasantry going back many years? You know, instead of talking about a cartoon monster? Doesn't make the participants and what they created or allowed to happen any less awful and diminish their responsibility for it.

And next ... Defending Stalin and collectivisation in the USSR? Oh my. You're seriously going to have to back this up sunshine. In the very few instances where such a thing has been discussed here, or more accurately the industrialisation drive it depended upon, I've always been consistent in looking at it from the perspective of mainly non-working class resistance and self-organisation by those millions of migrating peasants who ended up being proletarianised by the changes brought about by the Soviet state. You know that shit called class struggle? But it was country bumpkins, so you can't stamp it with the word SOCIALISM.

So, yet again more bilge, and daft accusations. Come on AYATOLLAH. Let's talk about the Cultural Revolution, without the aid of Wikipedia.


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 2, 2012)

This talk of China reminds me that China was the 5th member of the Gang of Five which set up the "United Nations" (successor to the League of Nations, also known as the League of Bandits). Its leader at the time was the warlord Chiang Kai Shek, hardly a democrat. Although on the winning side China didn't gain much from the war. Today of course it is different. Today Chinese imperialism has replaced Japanese as American imperialism's rival for control of the Eastern Pacific and its markets, trade routes, raw material sources and investment outlets and strategic points to protect these. Most observers are predicting a clash at some point. Certainly both sides are building up their military might in and around the area.


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## dylanredefined (Nov 2, 2012)

DotCommunist said:


> I read it was one bloke who shot all those officers. over the space of a week. How he ever slept again...


  Probably didn't live very long afterwards USSR tended to tidy up its awkward facts.
 The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war
meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
   Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given
isn't it.


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 2, 2012)

dylanredefined said:


> The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
> Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given isn't it.


Some people in India take a rather different view:


http://www.samarthbharat.com/bengalholocaust.htm


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## Random (Nov 2, 2012)

dylanredefined said:


> Probably didn't live very long afterwards USSR tended to tidy up its awkward facts.
> The Bengal famine was not caused by the British burning food stocks. Just by a poor harvest and a war
> meaning there was a shortage of food and transport to get food to the starving.
> Lots of stupidity and mistakes ,but, no obviously evil. Well Churchill was a cunt ,but,that is a given
> isn't it.


The Soviets and Chinese would say the same thing about their megadeath famines. "We never planned to kill all those peasants, it was a time of conflict"


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 2, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> This talk of China reminds me that China was the 5th member of the Gang of Five which set up the "United Nations" (successor to the League of Nations, also known as the League of Bandits). Its leader at the time was the warlord Chiang Kai Shek, hardly a democrat.


 
Chiang Kai-Shek was involved with the old Comintern too.  Following directives from Moscow to collaborate with the KMT would seriously fuck up the CPC.


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## Random (Nov 2, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Chiang Kai-Shek was involved with the old Comintern too.  Following directives from Moscow to collaborate with the KMT would seriously fuck up the CPC.


Did the KMT links with Comintern survive the sack of Shanghai in 1927? IIrc there was a left faction in the KMT, and it even held the official leadership for a while after, but Kai-Sheck managed to grab all the real military resources.


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 2, 2012)

Yep. But I'm not sure for how much longer, though. Of course the Comintern would, by its sixth congress in 1928, take an abrupt new direction and the start of the infamous ultra-sectarian Third Period, which had damaging consequences for the European labour movement, disastrously so in Germany.

You're on about the Northern Expedition, re the military resources? The Soviet Union gave the KMT aid in the fight against the warlords. The turning on the Communists happened part way through that military campaign.

The whole thing was a fuck up, though.

At the Comintern's fifth congress in 1924, a Bukharin and Stalin-pushed policy of collaboration with the 'national bourgeoisie' in the 'rural districts of the world' was approved. In 1925, the genius theoretician Stalin further advanced the thesis that the KMT (a rich merchant and big landlord vehicle) represented the 'revolutionary wing' of China's bourgeois nationalists.

It sent the CPC on a path of reactionary collaboration (acting in partnership with KMT landlords to put down the assertive peasant movement in 1926-27) and calamity in the form of a massacre of the CPC by 1927 (the KMT turned on them, launching armed attacks against the organised labour movement in the cities, nearly destroying the party apparatus, as well as non-Leninist organisation among China's small working class).

Then, it was off to the countryside.


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## Random (Nov 2, 2012)

Captain Hurrah said:


> You're on about the Northern Expedition re the military resources? The Soviet Union gave the KMT aid in the fight against the warlords. The turning on the Communists happened part way through that military campaign.


 Yes, and the official capital of KMT china was Wuhan, but Chaing ignored the party's constitution and set himself up as generalissimo in nanjing (iirc)


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 2, 2012)

That's right.  Became the official capital until the Japanese arrived.


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 4, 2012)

By coincidence today's_ Sunday Telegraph_ has an article on Stuart Laycock, author of _All the Countries We've invaded_. According to the book:


> Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, we've invaded or had some control over or fought conflicts in the territory of something like 171. That's a massive, jaw-dropping 88 per cent!


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## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

Laycock's definition of "invaded" seems to be so wide as to be almost useless. Looking at some of the countries on that list, like Romania: the only "invasion" must have either been SOE agents helping partisans, or have happened before the actual state of Romania existed.


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 5, 2012)

I don't think much of the title either. "We" didn't invade all these countries. It was armed forces acting under the government responsible to the ruling capitalist class that did, not us ordinary people.

As to Rumania, I think you are forgetting that Rumania was on the Axis side in the Second World War and was bombed by the Allies including Britain. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Romania_in_World_War_II


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## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

No, I'm not forgetting that at all. Didn't I just mention SOE agents? Bombing doesn't count as an invasion, that's a definition so loose as to be nonsense.


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 5, 2012)

Random said:


> Bombing doesn't count as an invasion, that's a definition so loose as to be nonsense.


Oh yeah? So Britain didn't invade Libya last year and America didn't invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War? Before you mention Syria, yes, Britain did send ground troops to invade it, Iraq and Iran during WW2.


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## Random (Nov 5, 2012)

Jean-Luc said:


> Oh yeah? So Britain didn't invade Libya last year and America didn't invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War?


 There's a word called "invasion", which means an incursion by forces; it's not the same as aerial bombing. To use one to mean the other is simply nonsense; Lazycock is doing so to hype his book. It's not a useful habit to fall into.


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## Captain Hurrah (Nov 5, 2012)

Aye.  The US didn't invade the DRV, just pounded the fuck out of it with planes.


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## Lo Siento. (Nov 5, 2012)

Random said:


> Laycock's definition of "invaded" seems to be so wide as to be almost useless. Looking at some of the countries on that list, like Romania: the only "invasion" must have either been SOE agents helping partisans, or have happened before the actual state of Romania existed.


But "All the countries we've intervened militarily in" would be a shit title for a book


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## dylanredefined (Nov 5, 2012)

I'm pretty sure the UK has dicked around with Guatemala when it wanted to take Belize.


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## exiledinwales (Nov 7, 2012)

"Cultural Revolutions" aside for a moment. The main problem I see with ayatollah's perspective on WW2 is ultimately it seems to come down to practical support for a state and ruling class. How does your perspective relate to practice, would you have signed up with the British state? And how does it relate to the question of war today?


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## Jean-Luc (Nov 8, 2012)

exiledinwales said:


> The main problem I see with ayatollah's perspective on WW2 is ultimately it seems to come down to practical support for a state and ruling class. How does your perspective relate to practice, would you have signed up with the British state?


I don't know about Ayatollah but this seems to be the SWP position. On Saturday at 6.30 Bookmarks in London are re-launching Donny Gluckstein's _A People's History of the Second World War_ (the Armistice Day weekend seems to be good occasion to draw attention to books on this war).

According to the Abstract, Donny Gluckstein starts off from the same position as James Heartfield:


> Governments on both sides of the Allied/Axis divide fought for world hegemony in a brutal fashion ranging from the Holocaust to the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. The war began as a fight between imperialist 'have nots' (Germany, Italy, Japan) against imperialist 'haves' (Britain, France, Russia). Thus it ended with the defeat of the former and a new carve-up of the world on Cold War lines. Stripped of anti-fascist rhetoric, the Allied governments fought to protect, extend, or create empires.


 But ends up saying that it was "a war worth fighting":


> The Second World War was different in essence from, for example, WWI or the Vietnam war. In its volatile combination of disparate elements it was unique, not only in the sheer scale of its wanton violence against civilians, but as a war worth fighting to end the scourge of fascism and Nazism.


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## sunnysidedown (Jan 12, 2013)

So, has anyone actually read the book in the OP?
I'm just over half way through and have found it fascinating if a little dry.
Also it obviously wasn't proof read as there are a shit load of errors that shouldn't be in a book like this (I'm reading an ebook version I downloaded) I will however pick up the print version if there is a 2nd edition which addresses these and also tightens up some of the writing.


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