Reading notes on Chapter 9 of The meaning of the Second World War by Ernest Mandel [Verso: 1986]

The meaning of the Second World War

by Ernest Mandel

Verso: 1986

Chapter 9 Ideology 

....British imperialism and its allies in the minor European imperialist countries, the main ideological weapon was antifascism. By playing upon the British and European masses' justified hatred of Hitler's and other fascist regimes' suppression of the labour movement encroachments upon vital workers' rights and freedoms and crimes against humanity such propaganda by and large succeeded in subordinating basic class antagonisms between capital and wage labour to the priority of defeating the Nazis. The imperialist character of the British, French and American states, their continuing exploitation and oppression of hundreds of millions of human beings in the colonial empires, the wholesale denial of elementary human rights therein, was successfully effaced by that propaganda — or at least pushed into the background. The complicity of social-democracy, the trade-union bureaucracy and the international Communist apparatus was vital to the effectiveness of that campaign. With the exception of the CPs during the interlude of the Hitler-Stalin pact (when ugly concessions were made to German imperialist ideology), it was forthcoming.

....In the occupied territory of Europe, the phenomena of superexploitation and national oppression added a nationalist dimension to anti-fascist ideology, making it even more acceptable to the broad masses. In Britain, traditional nationalism and even chauvinism formed an element of the ideological campaign, but with minor effects on the working class (as the failure of Churchill's election campaign in 1945 would demonstrate)

.... the United States, where, in contrast to Europe, the absence of political class consciousness in the working class is an enduring characteristic of the political situation, the interplay of ideological motifs in government propaganda was less complex than in Britain or the rest of Europe. Militant anti-fascism, and a cruder version of the 'war-for-freedom' theme than Churchill's or de Gaulle's, were indeed prevalent. But they were hamstrung by such palpable realities as anti-Black racism in the South and, increasingly, in the North too. Moreover, traditional populist 'anti-colonialism' made it difficult for the Roosevelt administration to cover up wholesale for the continuous denial of political rights and self-determination in the British and French colonies. So straightforward nationalism, in the first place anti-Japanese nationalism fuelled by popular indignation against Tokyo's 'day of infamy' at Pearl Harbor, became the main ingredient in Washington's war propaganda. The world would learn that it was not possible to step on the toes of Innocent Virtuous Red-blooded White Americans without unleashing a mighty boomerang effect the world, and not only the Tempei, the Fuhrer and the comic-opera Duce. The message was received loud and clear, and largely accepted, at least inside the USA. It was rather more difficult to get it through overseas, although it was quite successful there too.

....Soviet bureaucracy tried to stick to the peculiar ideology that had emerged from the Thermidor: a mixture of crude, dogmatised and simplified 'Marxism- Leninism ', doctored and deform ed to suit the bureaucracy's specific interests; a no less crudely byzantine cult of Stalin (the soldiers and workers were literally called to fight and die 'for the Fatherland, for Stalin'); and a growing Great-Russian nationalism . Following German imperialist aggression, the Communist and pseudo-communist themes rapidly receded into the background, as, incidentally, did the Stalin cult at least until 1943. Russian nationalism more and more came to the fore, together with panslavism . This culminated in Stalin's Victory Manifesto of May 1945, which defined the victory as that of the Slav peoples in 'their century-old struggle against the Germanic peoples'. So much for the counter-revolutionary (Trotskyist?) formula of the Communist Manifesto, according to which the history of all societies is the history of class struggles, not the history of ethnic struggles. 

....Oppressed peoples' national consciousness emerged as a powerful mass phenomenon, partially channeled into the interests of the national bourgeoisie in the w orld's two main underdeveloped countries, China and India. Contrary to the nationalism of oppressor nations, this consciousness contains a progressive ingredient. It can unleash a progressive political dynamic. But when it takes the form of nationalism it also carries the seeds of reactionary class collaboration, potentially stifling the struggle of the workers and the poor peasants for political class independence and the defence of their material interests against their 'national' exploiters.

....emergence of mass nationalism in the Arab countries and the first example since the Mexican revolution of organised mass nationalism in Latin America, above all in Argentina with Peronism.

....the dominant ideology of Japanese imperialism was extreme chauvinist nationalism, with a growing ingredient of 'pro-Asian anti-white-power' demagogy. Demagogy, because the Japanese imperialists, if and when victorious, treated 'their' colonies' Asian peoples, if anything, worse than did the British, French, American or Dutch colonialists. 

....to what extent were they simply cowed, intimidated, terrorised and paralysed by atomisation into passive submission?

Nazi ideology, with its specific mixture of extreme chauvinism, anti-Communism, pseudo-socialist demagogy and racism (culminating in mass m urderers' anti-semitism) successfully welded together the bulk of the middle and upper class (including the officer corps), the traditionally non-organised (non-class conscious) minority of the working class and the declasse elements of all social classes. T his was never more, and probably less, than half of the German people early all commentators have treated Hitler's fanatic antisemitism leading to the Holocaust as beyond rational explanation - something totally different from all other ideologies of the twentieth century (i.e. the imperialist era). We do not think that such drastic historical exceptionalism can be empirically or logically sustained.

....once large groups of human beings are considered as intrinsically inferior as 'sub-human', as Untermenschen, as some species of animal then it only takes one more ideological-political step to deny them , not only the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to life itself. In the peculiar and increasingly destructive suicidal combination of 'perfect' local rationality and extreme global irrationality which characterises international capitalism, this step is frequently taken.

In other words, the seeds of the Holocaust are not to be found in traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-semitism - although, naturally, such anti-semitism among sectors of the Polish, U kranian, Baltic, Hungarian, and Russian petty bourgeoisie offered fertile ground for tolerating and aiding the Holocaust. This type of anti-sem itism led to pogroms, which were to the Nazi murderers what knives are to the atom bomb. The seeds of the gas chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors. In such cases, the term genocide is fully justified: millions of men, women and children were killed just because they belonged to a supposedly 'inferior', 'subhuman' or 'wicked' collective group. It is true that these crimes of colonialism/imperialism occurred outside Europe. But it was precisely German imperialism's 'manifest destiny' to colonise Eastern Europe. The Nazis and the most extreme proponents of the imperialist doctrine of racial superiority by no means intended the enslavement and extermination only of the Jews; gypsies and sections of the Slav people figure on the same list. Most historians and other commentators conveniently forget that the first group of Untermenschen to be slaughtered in the gas chambers during the war were not Jews but ethnic Germans certified 'mentally insane': two hundred thousand of these (again, men, women and children) were exterminated in 1940-41 in Aktion T.

When we say that the germ of the Holocaust is to be found in colonialism's and imperialism's extreme racism, we do not mean that the germ inevitably and automatically produces the disease in its worst form. For that eventuality, racist madness has to be combined with the deadly partial rationality of the modern industrial system. Its efficiency must be supported by a servile civil service, by a consistent disregard of individual critical judgement as basically 'subversive' (Befehl ist Befehl) by thousand of passive executive agents (in fact: passive accomplices of crime); by the conquest of power by desperado-type political personnel of a specific bourgeoisie, and that class's readiness to let them exercise political power; by a frenzy of a va banque aggression unleashed, not only by these desperadoes, but also by significant sectors of big business itself; by cynical realpolitik leading to the worst blackmail and systematic state terrorism (Goering, Hitler and co. threatening to eradicate, successively, Prague, Rotterdam, London, Coventry lwir werden ihre Stadte ausradieren!': something which became credible only if such threats were occasionally implemented); by the gradual implementation of that state terrorism unleashing an implacable logic of its own; by a fetid substratum of unconscious guilt and shame, which had to be rationalised in spite (or better: in function) of monstrous crimes. The Holocaust only comes at the end of this long causal chain. But it can and must be explained through it. Indeed, those who understood the chain were able to foresee it .

....one should not forget that anti-semitism was widespread among most nationalist-conservative circles in France and Russia as well as in Germany, before and during World War I. It reached a paroxysm at the end of the war, during the revolutionary period. Extreme sentiments were expressed which Hitler had only to pick up and systematise....

....Explaining and understanding a crime does not imply any apology for it: the Holocaust the deliberate and systematic killing of six million men, women and children simply because of their ethnic origin — stands as a unique crime in mankind's sad criminal history. But what explaining and understanding does imply is that similar causes can have similar effects; analogous crimes could be repeated against other peoples if capitalism survives long enough to unleash the totality of its barbaric potential once again.

....Internationalist or even simply humanist consciousness were at a historical low-point so much so that many thought that an irreversible slide towards barbarism had already set in, Orwell's 1984 being the prototype of such premonition.

....The disappearance of the fascist dictatorships in Europe, and the victory of the Yugoslav and Chinese revolutions, were the clearest expressions of this modification in the global balance of class forces. The upsurge of the French and Italian labour movement in 1944-48; the landslide victory of the British Labour Party in 1945 ; the insurgency of national liberation movements throughout Asia which seriously weakened imperialism in the 1945-50 period - these must be added to them . Such upheavals ultimately made possible a limited and contradictory revival of working-class consciousness and genuine internationalism too, even if they had to start from a very low level.

Certain social forces and individuals saved humanity's and the international proletariat's honour during the Second World War. The Amsterdam workers launched a magnificent strike in February 1941 against the first anti-semitic measures of the Nazi occupation. The Yugoslav Communists built a proletarian brigade much to the fury of Stalin which succeeded in recruiting several thousand Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and German soldiers and volunteers into its ranks. The Danish resistance saved nearly all the Danish Jews from the Holocaust by transporting them overnight to Sweden. Small groups of Japanese leftists aided the Chinese guerrillas in Manchuria. An ex-militant of the Left Opposition, Lev Kopelev, succeeded in organising anti-fascist propaganda in the German language so efficiently that the German citadel of Grandenz surrendered without a fight to the Red Army. Having thus saved the lives of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers, he was promptly arrested and imprisoned by Stalin's NKVD for the hideous crime of 'cosmopolitanism '.20 A tiny group of European Communists under the leadership of Leopold Trepper set up an information network in occupied France and Belgium which was worth several divisions for the Red Army, according to expert opinion. After the liberation of France, Trepper travelled to Poland where he was promptly arrested by the NKVD and kept in jail for several years. Small groups of internationalist Communists, generally of Trotskyist conviction, combined anti-fascist resistance activity with a steadfast defence of working-class interests and a staunch internationalist attitude towards the individual German soldier and worker. Many of them paid with their lives for their stance, one much feared by the fascists.

....These were small exceptions. But they demonstrated that under the ashes heaped upon the workers' class consciousness by Noske, Hitler and Stalin, a spark remained. From that spark, new flames would arise. What these proletarian internationalists embodied was the conviction that the war could end otherwise than by the restoration of ruling-class power or the emergence of new bourgeois states; that it could end otherwise than by the total victory of either of the two coalitions; that it could lead to the spread of victorious popular socialist revolutions.