Paul Flewers wrote: > The Second World War was the last time that Britain played anything like a > major role on a world scale, and I guess that the endless commemorating of > it here is at least in part an unconscious recognition of this.
After more furniture busting than has been seen since the barroom fight in "Shane", the comments on "Stalin Nostalgia" and "Churchill Nostalgia" have died down on my blog. I don't want to stir things up there again, but do want to offer another thought about it here where belief in a "Good War" is less entrenched presumably. It seems that both sides in the debate agree that Churchill was fighting an imperialist war but Newman and company argue that this was secondary to the need to defeat Hitler. Every effort had to be bent toward mobilizing the working class for a militant war against Hitler, even if it was under the stewardship of a dog like Churchill. That poses the question of the responsibilities of Marxists. How in the world can a "pro-war" revolutionary current possibly not agitate around all the terrible things that the British ruling class was up to? For example, I have been harping on Bengal. If Indian Communists told their British comrades what was going on, it would be *criminal* not to mount demonstrations against the policies that led to a famine that would kill 3 million Indians. Remaining silent around such issues would of course be dictated by the need to get everybody on a war footing and follow the military/political machine but it would end up discrediting the revolutionary "pro-war" left. Which of course is what happened in the USA. If a parallel process took place in Britain, that would be an interesting topic to research but I have a feeling that it did not. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
