WW II: IMPERIALISM SURVIVES

This week the world marked the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II. During the six-year war — from 1939 to 1945 —  some 70 million people died. Of these only 17 million were combatants. As the war intensified, the belligerents did not care a damn about the rules of warfare. They resorted to all sorts of barbaric acts.

While the Nazis killed millions of Jews, gypsies, Russians and other non-German nationals, millions of people also died in attacks carried out by the allied forces, which emerged victorious in the war.

History is more often written by the victors. The silence of the vanquished is the foreword to this history. If Adolf Hitler’s Germany had won the war, his version of why World War II broke out would have prevailed. He would not have been painted as history’s most hated villain. He would have been a hero — like Alexander the Great. He would have been hailed as a great leader of poor socialist workers, who voted him to become the Chancellor of Germany in 1933. He would have been regarded as an exemplary nation builder.

This is no attempt at glorifying Hitler but a nudge to draw attention to history and the need to question it. A controversy rages over the number of Jews Hitler killed. Many put the figure at six million. But it could be much more. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and some European academics like David Irving, however, dispute the six million figure and call for fresh probes and research.

Disputes apart, it goes without saying that Hitler was a killer and many people, including millions of Jews, suffered during his reign of terror.

Though he came to power on the votes of the working class people, it was the Communists who spearheaded the cause of the workers, that he arttempted to get rid of first before his murderous eyes turned towards the Jews, the gypsies and the liberals in an attempt to build a fatherland made up of the super human race — the Aryans. When he was going after the Communists, the so-called democratic states of Europe hailed Hitler as the crusader against Soviet Bolshevism. But that was before the war broke out. When he triggered the war, he became a cold-blooded mass murderer, whose atrocities could find their historic parallels in Genghis Khan and Timur. Modern history has recorded many genocides and atrocities, but none comes close to those committed by Hitler. The policies of Josef Stalin led to the deaths of some 17 million Russians. Some put the figure at 60 million. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution caused the deaths of 30 million people. But Hitler remains the most despised villain.

President Harry Truman who authorized the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki said, “When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.” But he escaped the brush that painted Hitler a villain. President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq has led to the deaths of more than 1.3 million Iraqi civilians. Yet historians and biographers would not compare him with the Fuhrer, the incarnation of all that was evil.

In their books we mainly read about the atrocities committed by the vanquished. Very little is spoken about the horrors committed by the allied forces.

When World War II began, the belligerents confined their attacks only to military targets and respected civilian sanctuaries. But this unwritten agreement was broken in 1940 when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to bomb Berlin. Well known British strategist Basil Liddell-Hart in his book “Strategy: The Indirect Approach” noted that the so-called peaceful states at times go to greater extremes than predatory ones when they are aroused to the point of war.

The Anglo-American bombing of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, in 1945, just months before Germany’s surrender, is another example that shows the allied — the so-called good guys — didn’t give a damn about the safety of civilians. It is said that in four air raids, 1,300 British and US aircraft dropped 3,900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, killing upto 40,000 people, most of whom were refugees. No war crime tribunal was set up to punish those who killed these innocent civilians.

This war was waged long before television journalism brought wars to the living rooms. Hence the tears and the trauma of the survivors were not seen.

Two months after the Dresden attack, American B-29 bombers carried out a similar, if not a more intense, attack on Tokyo. On March 9-10, some 335 B-29 bombers dropped around 1,700 tons of bombs on Tokyo, killing some 100,000 civilians. According to some estimates, the number of people wounded in this attack exceeded a million people.

Japan was tried for crimes it committed during the war. But there was no tribunal to punish those who killed 100,000 people in Tokyo and another 300,000 in the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is said that truth is the first casualty of war. It remains so though 70 years have lapsed since the beginning of World War II.

What was this war about? Was it a war that began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939? Very little is spoken about Britain’s agreement with Germany a year before the war began. In terms of this agreement, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain allowed Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia. Also forgotten is the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or the Stalin-Hitler Pact signed a week before the war broke out. Though Stalin and Hitler did not trust each other, this agreement included a secret protocol under which the Soviets gave their nod for the German invasion of Poland while Germany did not mind the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Northern Romania.

These secret protocols show that World War II was not a war between the Nazis and the allied forces, the good guys. Rather it was a war between empire builders who wanted to invade and colonise countries and rob their resources.

In this imperialistic war, the allied forces won. The world war ended but it did not bring about world peace because the greed for power and the desire to plunder resources remained.

The victors got together and gave birth to a new world order — an undemocratic global system. They set up an international body called the United Nations and projected themselves as pacifists. They included in the UN charter a clause against war. Article 2(4) of the Charter says, “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of war or force against the territorial integrity and political independence of any other state.” Yet they were the very people who violated this clause before the ink on the paper was dry. In what came to be known as the Cold War, Europe was divided — with Western Europe allying itself with the United States, which emerged as the most powerful state after the war, while the Eastern Europe sided with the Soviet Union. Germany itself was split into two. Trouble was also brewing in Vietnam where the people waged a successful independence struggle against the French. Their success was only thwarted by the United States which entered the Vietnam War to check the spread of communism in Asia.

The 1950s saw wars erupting in the Korean peninsula. It was also a war of independence but unfortunately it assumed the shape of a war of ideologies between the United States and the Soviet Union. Wars also erupted in West Asia with the creation of Israel in 1948.

These wars that erupted after World War II not only point to the failure of the UN system but also underscores the maxim that might is right. Virtually the world has not seen peace after World War II ended. Yet we call ourselves civilised. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan show that we are far from being civlised. Wars are the product of aggressive, fanatic and criminal leaders who do not give a damn about civilian casualties. These leaders sometimes act as agents of the arms industry, the oil lobby and multinationals which try to plunder the resources of the conquered country. This is happening in Iraq. Does anyone need further proof?