------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 17, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
EDITORIAL: THE MYTH OF D-DAY
The Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, was certainly not a myth. The soldiers--U.S., British, French, Polish and others--who landed on the beaches believed they were shedding their blood to end the nightmare of Nazism.
But when U.S. presidents like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan travel to the beaches of Normandy to commemorate the Allied invasion, they rewrite history for the purposes of their own ruling class today.
President George W. Bush didn't utter the word "Iraq" during the June 6 ceremonies. But everything he said was geared toward building support for Washington's war drive for imperial empire.
Voice of America reported that the Allied forces fought "for the noblest of causes--human freedom." And that Bush said, "America would do it again for our friends."
Then, as now, the Pentagon is not a liberation army motivated by the noble cause of freedom.
In the early 1930s, the U.S. capitalist class welcomed Hitler's counter- revolutionary rise to power, because it meant stopping the socialist revolution in Germany. U.S. investment in Germany soared 45 percent while Hitler was being bankrolled by segments of German industry and banking to smash the labor unions and unleash anti-Jewish pogroms.
Some magnates were openly sympathetic to the objectives of German fascism. They included Henry Ford, J. Paul Getty, Joseph P. Kennedy, John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen--later head of the CIA.
Big capital in the United States, France and Germany hoped that German imperialism would aim its gun turrets to the east and attack the Soviet Union. The Nazis were also eager to crush the Soviet Union after consolidating their base in Europe.
On June 21, 1941, the German high command launched a devastating attack on the USSR, code-named Barbarossa. The goal of the military campaign, according to Hitler, was "the ultimate annihilation of Bolshevism from the face of the planet."
Washington's position? U.S. Vice President Harry Truman said at the time, "If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible."
In the four years that followed, the Nazis slaughtered 28 million Soviet soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands of Soviet towns and cities, factories and collective farms were destroyed.
The Pentagon brass were more concerned about fighting Japan for the spoils of exploitation in China, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and other Asian countries. To the West, the United States and Britain concentrated their forces against their German-Italian imperialist competitors in North Africa.
The qualitative turning point in the war was not Normandy but Stalingrad. In that battle alone more soldiers were killed than the United States lost in the entire war. In 1943 the battle for Stalingrad turned the tide. With the mobilization of the entire Soviet people behind it, the Red Army broke the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
The same year the Soviet Army defeated Hitler's infamous Panzer divisions in the monumental tank battle at Kursk.
It was the Soviet Army that smashed the German war machine. Its comrade allies were the Communist-led partisan movements battling the Nazis in Yugoslavia, Poland, Italy, Belgium, France, Greece, Albania and elsewhere. The deaths of tens of thousands of Italian soldiers on the Soviet front ignited mass insurrection in Italy against Mussolini's fascist reign.
Washington and London were afraid the Red Army and Communist partisans would liberate Europe, not only from fascism but from capitalism. That's what motivated their sudden imperialist race to "liberate" Europe.
Eleven months later, it was the Red Army that raised the red flag of liberation in Berlin.
While the war was formally ending in Europe, the imperialist war against socialism and the Soviet Union was beginning a new phase: Cold War. The first inhumanly brutal act of that phase of war came when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. ruling class would not allow the Soviet Union to rebuild after the devastation of World War II. Instead, the USSR was forced to spend much of its collectively produced wealth to defend itself against Pentagon atomic and nuclear threats.
While Eastern Europe tried to construct economies on a socialist basis, Washington turned its occupation of Western Europe into a nuclear-armed, anti-communist military machine aimed at the USSR.
The Pentagon and State Department actively recruited Nazi war criminals for anti-Soviet operations against the workers' states in Eastern Europe.
The U.S. ruling class profited handsomely from World War II. These capitalists made money hand over fist from military production. U.S. corporations supplanted their imperialist rivals in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Those are the same kind of riches and profits that propel the U.S. war drive today in its "noble cause" to seize the oil-rich and strategically important areas of the Middle East and Central Asia. n
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