THIS YEAR the 'Allies' will be celebrating their victory over Nazi Germany. Already sen roused by Thatcher's initial refasal to celebrate VE Day. Britain's great war 'leaders' brought out. All in all we can be sure of being given greatest festivals of lies of all time.
The British ruling class has no intestion of allowing the truth about World War Il to be discussed. both Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinsock will join in the suppression. For it was the British ruling class, nore any other in the world. which created the conditions for World War Il and the greatest slaughter in history which it produced.
was tne storm has imposed of Treaty will be leaders such declared their of the Mussolini.
It was The British probably the invasion of Czechoslovakia. This policy fascism, appease Hitler.
for contemporary reasons.
Campaign for is the truth.
Of those who
Hitler and Mussolini, fought Franco in Spain. onwards.
The same VILLAI appeased Hitler.
those who celebrate with East.
The Sovie the western Europe from fascism.
British ruling
together with the French, which in 1919 Germany the infamous Versailles which helped prepare Hitler's rise to power. Already during the 1920s British Conservative prepared as Churchill. openly against admiration for British loans which helped were keep Nazi Germany afloat in the 1930s.
Conservative government was left of the 1930s directly participated in fighting. allowing Hitler to gain his great foreign policy victories — the occupation of the Rhineland, the invasion of Austria, and of appeasement of and of Hitler in particular, was not a mistake. The British ruling class, and the Conservative Partv above all. EUSL hoped that Hitler would be a bulwark against the Soviet Union. It is the same virulent anti-Sovietism which Margaret Thatcher puts forward today that in the 1930s led her predecessors to directly This point is extremely important to understand not oniv for historical but Thatcher, 'allies'? and her supporters, claim that it is the that is pursuing the same path as the appeasers of the 1930s. The exact reverse stands in the tradition of those who fought fascism in the 1930s.
campaigned against already or those wno fought Mosley in Britain, of those who The element which remains constant in the Conservative Party's policy is its violent op- Roosevelt position to the soviet Union and its support for right wing dictators — then her, now virtually every unpleasan regime in the world from South Africa history. policy which today demands Britain arm itself to the teeth than class content as that which in the 1930s has the Dresden Inal is une reality which Thatcher wishes to cover up But there is another fundamental feature of the war which Thatcher, and her, want covered up. This is that the war in Western Europe was itself a side show. The real World War II, the one that counted, was that fought out in the Mussolini † Union for most of the Germany army. It never fought against three-quarters.
Soviet army, and the Soviet people, not allies, who liberated British policy in the war, after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, was to leave the Soviet Union to do the bulk of the fighting while Churchill ensured the safeguarding of the empire the coming 'communism' Europe. British intervention in Greece and Italy in 1942, 1943 and 1944 designed to safeguard British capitalism's interests while the USSR to bear the brunt of The one thing that could have relieved the BUTCASULE on the an allied invasion of France, was constantly put back.
By the time Britain and the United States did invade Western Europe, in 1944, it was clear the USSR had already won the war. The D Day landings were as much about Soviet Union advancing too far as they were about the war with Germany - a war the Nazis by then had already lost.
Finally the British government will also take the greatest care to cover its atrocities in the war. We will hear -and rightly — much about the crimes of the Nazis. But how about the role of the It was once said of Churchill that he was chosen as war leader because it was necessary to have someone who could fight Hitler on his own terms. Churchill never had his own 'final solution' of the Jewish question because Britain never found itself needing it — Britain had carried out its 'final solution' of the Irish question in the nineteenth century and continued to rule the 'empire on which the sun never set.
Churchill couldn't order either, as For Truman nuclear bombing of Japan as a warning to the USSR. But within his limited resources Churchill was a war criminal on a scale to compare with any other in Nothing shows that more clearly This order for the bombing of the greatest : killing by a single attack in history. More died beneath Churchill's bombs in Dresden even than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
It was a 'fitting' ending to the policy which Britain had pursued throughout the 1920s and '30s. Having helped condemn the German workers to Hitler, une brusa ruling class under precisely the same Churchill who had so admired then slaughtered German workers beneath British bombs.
Next month sees the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. We are devoting our centre pages to that as a fitting comment on the nature of the 'celebrations' we are going to be invited to participate in during the collug weeks.
ill the war criminal purricane strength ushing to the fires taking with them huge quantities of debris to feed the lames. The fires spread inexorably to one single fire-storm;
lagration of raging flames and rushing minds.
The Dresden conflagration burned Ben hun a per it. Is giow was visible days, a pall of smoke three miles 200 miles away. Victims nerated in tens of thousands. nore died from suffocation or the efects of blast.
direct hit by explosive on a shelter killed over 200 people in a particularly gruesome way. The shelter contained the full force of the explosion so that rescue workers found no bodies only an even sludge of bulverized flesh and bone. The scene of struction was unimaginable A Swiss resident described what he saw ten days after the raid. His account mas published in a Swiss newspaper: The sight was so appalling without a second glance I decided not to pick my way among these corpses For this reason I turned back and headed for the Grosser Garten.
'But here it was even more appalling: walking through the grounds, • see torn-off mutilated torsos, and heads which had been wrenched off their bodies and Folled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I hadto clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs.
Horrified A horrified worker, one whose task it was to bury the dead, wrote: Never would I have thought that death could come to so many people in so many different ways. Never had I expected to see people interred in that cremated, torn and crushed to death; sometimes the victims looked like ordinary people apparently sleeping; the faces of others were racked with pain, the bodies stripped almost naked bv the tornado: there were wretched refugees from the East clad only in rags, and people from the Opera in all their tinerv: here the victim shapeless slab, there a layer of ashes shovelled into a zinc tub. Across the city, along the streets wafted the ungenerated, a con- Number Three command were insmall highMainly Chemnitz the operation a failure.
at ternationally.
Call tried
that legs, Germans themselves. 'The duct of Allied bombing.
the enemy.
state: burnt, upon military objectives, peacefully mediate battle-zone, tion, however impressive.' wand Darous must be learned. mistakeable stench of decaying flesh.' The RAF considered their night's work to be a success. A similar raid was planned for another city, Chemnitz.
Group of bomber cOhemid is a to on some 30 miles west briefed follows: of Dresden, and a much smaller target. Your reasons for going there tonight are to finish off any refugees who may have escaped from Dresden. You'll be carrying the same bomb loads, and if tonight's attack is a successful as the last, you will not be paying many more because of bad weather, was spared the taLe Dresden suffered. The RAF considered The scale of death and destruction Dresden so appalled that severe criticism was heard, nationally and inSo much so that Churplace responsibility elsewhere, and distance himself.
On 28 March 1945 a few months before the fall of Nazi Germany, he wrote: 'It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of Germany cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provi sion would have to be made for the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conI am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests rather than that of The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration such as oil and communications behind the imrather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destrucDresden's destruction had little or no effect on Germany's ability to prosecute the war, nor did it hasten the end barbe crimene see noever stare prevent future Dresdens the lessons of past Dresdens Socialist Action 25 January 1985 "i 7