In a June 2 speech at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S. president George Bush repeated the lie that in World War II Washington “saved the liberty of the world,” and that in the subsequent Cold War the U.S. government pursued the same goals. Bush presented Washington’s most recent assaults against Iraq and Afghanistan as a similar effort to “defend the peace through the forward march of freedom.”

All these oft-repeated claims are lies. What was the real character of World War II and Washington’s goals in it? Where did the interests of the world’s workers and farmers lie? These questions are explained in the following excerpt from the article “Washington’s Third Militarization Drive” by Mary-Alice Waters in issue no. 7 of the Marxist magazine New International. The excerpt is printed with permission of New International.

That piece is followed by an excerpt from an editorial in the Sept. 23, 1944, Militant that appeared just months after the U.S. landing in Normandy. Subheadings are by the Militant.
 

It was an interimperialist war in which the defeat by Washington and its allies of Germany, Japan, and Italy did nothing to eliminate the economic and social roots of fascism nor the causes of imperialist oppression. Fascism, the most virulent form of maintaining imperialist rule, will again attempt to raise its head in any period of deep capitalist crisis and accelerating class polarization and combat.

It was a war to roll back the Russian revolution and reestablish capitalism in the Soviet Union. With enormous sacrifice the workers and peasants of the first and at that time only workers’ state turned the tide against German imperialism’s invading armies. They prevented the imperialist powers from realizing this historic objective, which none of them have ever abandoned from October 1917 to this day.

It was a multifront war for national liberation in which the colonized and oppressed nations of the world took good advantage of the interimperialist conflict to advance their interests from India to China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea, the Mideast, Ireland, and Québec.

A fourth war also took shape as the imperialist bloodletting continued: the war carried out by resistance forces—many organized by the workers’ movement—in the occupied countries of Europe. That was a war against the fascist dictatorships imposed by Hitler’s National Socialist movement. It was also a war by the workers to create the most favorable possible conditions for the working classes in Europe to emerge victorious over their own bourgeoisies, whether fascist or democratic imperialist, as the conflict unfolded.  
 
‘We are going home’
After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the U.S. rulers, who came out on top of the pile in 1945, found themselves confronted with a disintegrating army. Workers and farmers in uniform, particularly those in the Pacific theater, demanded to be brought home immediately. They saw no reason to stay in uniform once the war they were fighting, the war against fascism, had been won.

The rulers in Washington, however, wanted to reap the harvest of victory over their rivals by taking control of Asia. In particular, they aimed at keeping China under imperialist control. As GIs throughout Asia started demonstrating by the thousands, the Democrats and Republicans in Washington howled, “But we are losing China!”

The GIs answered, “You may be losing China. We are going home!” They simply refused to continue under arms. Demobilization was accelerated and go home they did, by the millions. The U.S. armed forces had ceased to be an effective fighting force for imperialist interests.

That’s how the postwar period began in the United States: with a GI going-home movement that no class on earth could have stopped, as well as a massive strike wave that brought nearly two million workers, many of them newly returned vets, onto the picket lines demanding an immediate end to the wartime wage controls.  
 
New militarization drive
In response to the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II, the advance of the colonial revolution as the imperialist powers warred against each other, and the resulting shift in the international relationship of forces to the detriment of imperialism, Washington had to take steps to put back together a military force to use against struggles by workers and peasants around the world. With World War II barely over, the U.S. rulers needed a new militarization drive.

At the same time, the employers still had to housebreak the labor movement that had been born in the giant struggles of the rise of the CIO industrial union movement in the second half of the 1930s. They also had to try to prevent a massive movement for Black equality from arising on the basis of the civil rights militancy that had emerged during the war. The witch-hunt and anticommunist reaction of the end of the 1940s and the 1950s were aimed at accomplishing these goals.

The wartime conscription law was allowed to lapse in 1947, but the draft machinery was kept intact and the Selective Service Act was pushed through in 1948 as the new militarization drive began to roll. A “peacetime” draft was institutionalized for the first time in U.S. history. With the growing use of deferment loopholes by bourgeois and middle-class youth, the postwar army became even more working-class in composition. Military spending soared, as Washington accelerated the nuclear arms race following the Soviet Union’s development of an atomic bomb in 1949. When the U.S. rulers held a monopoly on atomic weapons, they used the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sacrificing the lives of more than 200,000 civilians in Japan. Their political aim in doing so was to demonstrate to the toilers of the world that Washington would not hesitate to unleash this weapon of mass horror to protect its empire.

The Korean war was launched in the midst of the witch-hunt at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, but it was greeted in the United States with a marked decline in patriotic fervor compared with World War II. By no measure did it ever become a popular war. But there was little active opposition to the war aside from some socialist and pacifist organizations, which were rapidly declining in size and influence. (The social democrats at the time outspokenly supported the U.S. war against Korea.)

[During this period the Socialist Workers Party was] part of the defensive battles in the labor movement against steps by the employers and the government to use the militarization drive to undermine the power of the unions in the war industries. In particular, we fought the introduction of the system of “security clearances,” aimed at victimizing union activists and other militant workers and weakening union protection and safety conditions. The party also continued to defend the right of workers on the picket lines to protect themselves against bosses’ thugs, and especially the right of Blacks to defend themselves against racist violence and terror.
 

The following excerpt is taken from a Sept. 23, 1944, Militant editorial titled, “The Only Road to Emancipation for All Europe,” which appeared three months after the U.S. landing on the Normandy beaches of France.

Earlier that year, the Militant had regained its second-class mailing rights, which the Postmaster General had revoked in March 1943 at the urging of Attorney General Francis Biddle to suppress views such as those expressed in this editorial. At a Jan. 21, 1943, hearing where the Militant editors confronted this attack, the attorney for the postal service, William O’Brien, asserted, “We are not concerned here with questions of truth or falsity. It does not make any difference if everything the Militant said is true.” The fight to restore the Militant’s mailing rights was part of the struggles by militant workers during World War II to defend their political rights in face of the employers’ wartime offensive against labor.

The Fourth International, to which the editorial refers, was the name of the international communist movement to which the Socialist Workers Party belonged. It defended the revolutionary political course that had been charted by V.I. Lenin and the Bolshevik Party in the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the early years of the Communist International, and continued to carry out this revolutionary course after the Comintern degenerated in the mid-1920s under the domination of a privileged bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin.
 

In September, 1938, one year before the outbreak of the second imperialist war, the founding conference of the Fourth International met in Europe and set forth a program of socialist emancipation for Europe and the world.

Today, after five years of war, capitalist Europe is disintegrating and falling into ruins. Amid the chaos of a dissolving social order the suffering masses are rising in revolt against their rulers and oppressors. In Italy, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Greece, France, Denmark, and Poland the insurgent workers and peasants are displaying increasing determination to sweep away the rotted system which subjected them to the horrors of fascism and war. Tomorrow this movement will spread through Germany and the whole of Europe.

The Allied imperialists have appeared on the scene in the guise of “liberators.” But while conducting war against their German imperialist rivals, they have already made it abundantly clear that they have another purpose in view—to prevent the masses from taking their fate into their own hands and finding a way out of the bloody morass along the only possible road, the road of socialist revolution.

Both in word and deed, Roosevelt and Churchill have shown that far from liberating Europe, they intend to subject its peoples to perpetual capitalist slavery. Germany is to be dismembered and the whole European continent Balkanized in order to assure the ascendancy of Anglo-American capital. As in Italy the peoples are to be saddled with police-military dictatorships subservient to the Allied conquerors.

Aiding and abetting these would-be enslavers of the European masses are the Stalinists, Social-Democrats, and the liberals—all of them defenders of the rotted capitalist order. The Stalinists are agents of the sinister Kremlin gang which, fearing for its own rule, has allied itself with the “democratic” imperialists and reactionary capitalist cliques of Europe in a plot to abort and destroy the coming revolution.

The only alternative to the reactionary plans of the imperialists and their European allies is the program of the socialist revolution. Only by the utter destruction of the outworn capitalist system can Europe go forward along a new road leading to lasting peace and security. The program of the Fourth International alone offers real hope to the tortured peoples of Europe and the world.  
 
 
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