There Is No Peace: 60 Years Since End of World War II

The Yalta conference closed amid jubilation over the “complete accord” among the victory-flushed Anglo-American imperialists and their ally in the Kremlin. But the peoples of the world, whether they emerge in the camp of the victors or the vanquished, have no cause whatever for joy. While the decisions of the “Big Three” remain cloaked with impenetrable secrecy as were all their previous agreements, their actions have long ago testified that the only charter sponsored by them is the charter of the counter-revolution. Their common goal is not to promote progress, freedom and prosperity but to perpetuate reaction, slavery and degradation in a world moving towards savagery.

If the scope of secret diplomacy in the second world war has surpassed all previous performances in this field, it is because of the enormity of the conspiracy that is being consummated behind the backs of the masses. The sum and substance of this conspiracy is to deprive the peoples of the world of any voice in determining their own fate. Left to their own volition, the war-tortured masses of Europe would swiftly and unfailingly embrace Socialism as the only way out of the bloody morass of capitalism.

Tendencies to transform the imperialist war into the struggle for the abolition of capitalist rule and of capitalist property forms manifested themselves early in the second world war. This was the meaning in its initial stages of the civil war that flared in Yugoslavia in 1941. This was implicit in the downfall of Italian fascism. The same trend manifested itself in France, Rumania and Bulgaria, and most recently in Greece.

With the collapse of Hitler’s regime, the mightiest force for Socialism on the European continent—the multimillion-headed proletariat of Germany—would be set in motion and would invest the unfolding European revolution with irresistible force. The three conspirators at Crimea know this. Their main objective is to atomize the forces of the German working class, clamp its dismembered sections in the vise of tri-partite military occupation and drown in blood every attempt of independent action on the part of the masses. With the main detachment of the Socialist revolution in Europe thus paralyzed, they hope, with the aid of the treacherous Stalinist and Social Democratic leadership, to demoralize all the other revolutionary sectors and to bleed them white in a series of isolated battles, patterned after Churchill’s recent bestial exploits in Greece.  
 
Plans for German disarmament
The plans for the disarmament of Germany agreed upon at Yalta are, of course, cynically presented as safeguards of peace. There is nothing pacifist about them. The impelling considerations are to deliver the country to the mercy of the imperialist “democracies” by robbing it of every possibility of resistance and self-defense. The barb of this “disarmament” is aimed primarily at the German masses whom the “Big Three” intend to disarm at all costs. Against the insurgent workers Churchill and Roosevelt will not hesitate for a moment to place armaments at the disposal of the Nazis, with whom the American military authorities have been so brazenly collaborating in the occupied areas.

Least of all will this measure bring alleviation so far as the monstrous burden of militarism is concerned. After the first world war Germany remained completely disarmed for almost a decade and a half. This did not lead to a diminution in world expenditures on armaments. On the contrary, larger sums were expended on armies, navies and armaments after the Versailles Peace¹ than in the era of the armament race, which preceded the war of 1914-1918. The peak year of that era was 1913.

If the monetary values spent on armaments in 1913 are set at 100, we shall find that the index for 1925 amounts to 135, climbing to 157 in 1929 and soaring in 1936 to 350, or three and a half times that of 1913. The growth of militarism is inseparable from capitalist decay. It constitutes a striking confirmation of Lenin’s analysis that capitalism breeds war. It ought to be added that this intolerable growth of militarism was one of the causes of the dislocation and paroxysm of world economy in the ’twenties and ’thirties. To get rid of militarism it is necessary to sever its capitalist roots.

A peace treaty can prove just as destructive, if not more so, than the war which preceded. The economic pillage of Germany, projected at Yalta, should it be realized in life, will bring this truth home with crushing force. Leon Trotsky pointed out during the first world war that Europe is “not only a geographic term, but a certain economic and cultural-historic community.” Germany is the most advanced component part of this economic organism. The bulk of Europe’s productive apparatus is concentrated on her territories. The greatest productive force in Europe is the German working class. How can Europe survive, let alone successfully undertake reconstruction, if these are decimated?

The problems of reconstruction after the first world war appear insignificant compared to the problems and tasks that lie ahead. Each day brings new reports of famine spreading throughout Europe. In France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Greece —everywhere millions face slow death by starvation. The threat of epidemics looms more and more starkly….  
 
Work of reconstruction
The work of reconstruction will have to be carried on in a world fearfully impoverished by the war….

The American and English imperialists are least of all concerned with the restoration of Europe. England’s primary consideration is to retain her colonial empire….

Yalta is the banner of the counter-revolution. Here the seal was set on Europe’s doom. Here Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin arrived at a division of labor in their program to crush all opposition of the insurgent masses to this death-sentence. The completion of the process of Europe’s ruination already far advanced—that is their avowed charter for the agonized continent.

Stalinism emerges from the Crimea Conference as the hangman of the revolutionary workers. The gory handiwork of the Noskes and Scheidemanns² who after the last war shot down in Germany tens of thousands of followers of Liebknecht³ and Luxemburg⁴, is this time entrusted to the Kremlin and its agents.

In return for this, Roosevelt and Churchill have underwritten the territorial booty that the Kremlin grabbed as a result of its 1939 pact with Hitler, along with spheres of influence in eastern Europe and the Balkans. In addition Stalin has been promised his share in the looting of Germany.  
 
Stalinist methods
In the period preceding Soviet involvement in the war the Stalinist bureaucracy sought to solve the great problems with its hand-to-mouth methods. They were sure they could escape war. And so they sought for every avenue—from “peace congresses,” “non-aggression pacts,” entry into the League of Nations, etc., etc., down to a “peace pact” with Hitler. This escapist policy instead of safeguarding the USSR served only to isolate the country and utterly expose it to the fullest blow of German imperialism, under conditions and at a time chosen by the enemy.

Now faced with the incredible tasks of reconstruction, which in large measure arise as a consequence of the previous policy, the Kremlin still fumbling empirically grasps as a panacea—at what? At the very solution attempted by none other than Clemenceau⁵ who once promised to rebuild France, likewise at the expense of Germany. Clemenceau’s scheme appeared much more feasible at the time inasmuch as the havoc in France was relatively limited, while Germany then emerged with far fewer losses, with her territories, cities and plants unravaged by direct military operations and, in other respects, in a condition infinitely superior to the existing one. Yet victorious France of 1918 found herself unable to squeeze out more than a fraction of the stipulated reparations. With Clemenceau’s 1918 policy Stalin who demands—and requires—much more will get much less, if he ever collects.

Furthermore, Germany after Versailles lost far more than France ever gained. This quickly exhausted the defeated country, rendering further payments out of the question. The end results this time will be the same, except that the stage of Germany’s complete insolvency will be reached even sooner. In any case, were Stalin to loot every remaining resource on German soil, it would not suffice to restore devastated Soviet agriculture and industry.

But Stalin was never primarily concerned with the economic well-being of the masses inside or outside the USSR. His policy has unfailingly been determined by entirely different considerations, namely: the subordination of everything else to the interests of preserving his regime, and the power and privileges of the usurping Soviet bureaucracy. Stalin knows that this regime could never maintain itself in the face of a successful German revolution.

But it is precisely the Soviet Union which will be the first to suffer the effects of a crushed German revolution. Nationalized property, collectivized agriculture, planned economy have all been deeply undermined by the war. They can be stabilized only on the basis of the economic unification of the continent, first and foremost, central Europe, and the Socialist collaboration of all its peoples. Failing this, the restoration of capitalism is inevitable in the USSR; and with that an equally inevitable worsening of the economic plight of the population….
 

1. The Treaty of Versailles, signed June 28, 1919, returned Alsace-Lorraine to France, deprived Germany of other territory in Europe plus all overseas colonies, limited Germany’s military strength, and provided for the payment of war reparations by Germany to the Allied powers. The treaty’s effect upon the German economy was disastrous; it was engineered to accomplish the dismantling of German economic and military strength in favor of the other imperialist powers, but it also had the aim of stemming the revolutionary tide in Germany. It was one of the factors that Hitler used demagogically in his ascent to power.

2. Gustav Noske and Philipp Sheidemann were leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) in first decades of twentieth century. They were chauvinists during World War I, and they participated in the German government that prosecuted the war and afterwards helped oversee the bloody suppression of the 1918-19 revolutionary uprising in Germany.

3. Karl Leibknecht (1871-1919) was a German revolutionary and the only member of the Reichstag (German parliament) to vote against war credits in December 1914. He helped found the Spartacus current in the SPD and used his parliamentary seat to lead antiwar agitation. He was jailed for antiwar activities in 1916 for two years. He was a founding leader of the German Communist Party in December 1918 and a leader of the Berlin workers’ uprising in January 1919. He was arrested and murdered following the suppression of the uprising at the instigation of SPD leaders.

4. Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a founding leader of the social democratic party in Poland in 1893. She later lived in Germany and joined the SPD in 1898. She became a leader of the Spartacus group during World War I along with Leibknecht, and was imprisoned in 1915. A founding leader of the German Communist Party, she was arrested and murdered at the instigation of the SPD after the 1919 uprising in Berlin.

5. Georges Clemenceau was French prime minister, 1906-09 and 1917-20. He was the chief organizer of the 1919 Paris conference and architect of the Treaty of Versailles.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. rulers debate Yalta pact
 
 
Previous article in the series:
1943 British bombing of Hamburg killed 45,000  
 
 
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