These are self-serving lies by defenders of the capitalist status quo. World War II was in reality several wars in one. First, it was a war between imperialist powers over the redivision and plunder of the world—in which the defeat by Washington and its allies of Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome did nothing to eliminate the economic and social roots of fascism nor the causes of imperialist oppression. Second, it was a war to defend the Soviet Union—the first workers state—against imperialist efforts spearheaded by Germany’s rulers to roll back the Russian Revolution and reestablish capitalism there, a struggle that workers and peasants won. And it was a war for national liberation in which colonial peoples advanced their struggles from India and China to the Mideast and Ireland.

A fourth war also developed: by resistance forces—many organized by the workers movement—in the occupied countries of Europe against the fascist dictatorships imposed by Hitler’s National Socialist movement. This was also a war by the workers to create the most favorable conditions for the working classes in Europe to emerge victorious over their own bourgeoisies, whether fascist or “democratic” imperialist, as the conflict unfolded.

In this quest for profits the imperialist rulers committed horrendous crimes that they still lie about. Washington’s nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as the Japanese government was close to surrender—is the one most cited. But liberal and Stalinist apologists for U.S. imperialism’s course, while issuing pacifist condemnations of the atom bombings, are silent about one of the most heinous deeds: the U.S. government’s napalm bombing of Tokyo and obliteration of most other major Japanese cities, which burned alive hundreds of thousands of civilians. Equally criminal was the firebombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and other German cities by British and U.S. bombers. The bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union, too, stained its hands with the blood of working people—from the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish army officers to the Stalin regime’s counterrevolutionary role in the defeat of the Spanish revolution.

Within the United States itself, the Roosevelt administration put 110,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. It framed up and jailed 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Teamsters union as well as leaders of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party for their opposition to U.S. imperialism’s course. The Communist Party USA supported these reactionary moves as part of its “people’s front” alliance with “antifascist” bosses.

These are not historical questions. They are about today. About why the U.S. rulers’ ongoing wars are not simply “policies” of one or another president but are driven by the very nature of capitalism in its highest, and last, stage—imperialism. About the lessons of the counterrevolutionary betrayals of Stalinism, which, however weakened, remains the syphilis of the labor movement today. And about the only road to peace—a revolutionary strategy to mobilize workers and farmers to take political power and disarm the imperialist war makers.
 
 
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U.S. firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 killed 100,000  
 
 
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