> > I remember having a knock down drag out fight with my father (Abel > Meeropol) about why the CPUSA refused to advocate getting into WW II > against the Nazis --- he kept repeating the mantra of the betrayal of > Czechoslovakia and Spain by "the west" which wanted Hitler to attack the > Soviet Union. Yes, I would say, I am not criticizing the Soviet Union for > making the non-aggression pact with Hitler (though I might have been very > critical of the USSR's "cooperation" with the Nazis in dismembering > Poland,etc.) but why was the US party so gung ho in favor of neutrality > and "peace" until the USSR was attacked --- I've never understood that > attitude of the US communists -- my only explanation is slavish devotion > to the CPUSSR but that begs the question >
Yes, of course, the CPUSA became an instrument of the foreign policy of Stalin's Soviet Union. Wasn't that a corollary of the concept of "Socialism in One Country"? If you accepted one you were bound to accept the other. Then you had to go about finding justification for your forked principles. Such justifications were easy to find, weren't they? With the USSR sidelined at the beginning of the war, many within the CP could be convinced that the war was another imperialist war like WWI. And indeed, it was, in large part, such a war. Look at the extent that France and England went to preserve their colonies; look at the extent to which the U.S. went to take over from British, French, and Japanese Imperialism. As a matter of ideological cover, convincing one's self that the war was an imperialist war was not very hard to do. And all of this could be reinforced by the historical example of World War I which was without a doubt a war fought for imperial gain on all sides. But after taking the stand that the War was unjustified from one point of view, the further step of advocating neutrality is not proven. The military triumph of Germany, Italy, and Japan would have produced a new barbarism that would have killed the possibility of socialism. On a smaller scale, I don't think the CPUSA's cooperation with the America Firsters could ever be justified as a good political measure. If you are only seeking a rationalization for your position you don't have to think beyond the first step. At the time, I think the best argument for neutrality was presented by the likes of the pacifist A. J. Muste. It is an intricate argument, and I don't want to go into it here, but it takes into account all the things that the CPUSA did not want to see, including the end result if Hitler and Mussolini could have established "Fortress Europe" and Japan could have taken permanent hold of an Asian "Co-Prosperity Sphere." The main point of Muste's argument was that the problem of dominance through violence in the world would be shifted by an allied victory from the destructiveness of the Axis power to the destructiveness of the new victor in the U.S. He was correct on that point. Three million dead in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Central America, and we can hardly count how many more around the world have been murdered by U.S. violence. And yet even Muste seemed to deal with the Pacific War differently than the European war. Was this Euro-centrism or a good estimation of Hitler in power? I don't know. And yet, even with the resulting nightmare of U.S. imperial dominance that is still part of our problem, World War II was something more than just an imperial war. It wasn't "The Good War" of the ideological fables but by the time of 1940, it was a necessary war, unlike the First World War which was a slaughter of the working classes. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#972): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/972 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76488407/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
