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By the time these lines appear in print the Allied invasion of Europe may be under way. The capitalist press is devoting many columns of space each day to descriptions of the mammoth preparations for this climactic agony of the war. Eisenhower has announced with an air of finality that Germany will be defeated before the year is out. Another American general in England tells a group of field officers that some of them will never return—“but we shall win.” There is a steely, inhuman quality about it all. Everything is cut and dried. Millions of human beings are being pushed around like chips in a great poker game. The Allied soldiers who are being shoved toward the bloody abyss know that a fearful ordeal awaits them. They have been schooled to fight and kill, to suffer and endure—to the end that Hitler may be defeated. And then? It is at this point that the official schooling ends. As every report on the subject plainly shows, the soldiers haven’t the least idea what they are fighting for.
The Atlantic Charter, with the “four freedoms”? Its pale, flickering existence was snuffed out by its very authors. Churchill made haste to proclaim its non-applicability to India. He and Roosevelt have worked out plans for dismembering Germany and Balkanizing the whole European continent for the profit and security of Anglo-American Big Business.
The imperialists now sense the futility of trying to surround their predatory schemes with an aura of disinterested idealism. So they don’t state any war aims. They just keep quiet. After all, there is North Africa. And there is Italy. The Moroccans and the Tunisians have been “liberated.” Is it just accident that they find themselves under the heel of the same old gang of French capitalists who now have American and British bayonets to back them up? Was it just some queer twist of fate that brought the Italians under the police-military dictatorship of Badoglio and the King after they had got rid of Mussolini and his blackshirt thugs?
LIBERAL PRETENSES AND NAKED REALITY
Only an obtuse liberal or a venal Stalinist could pretend to believe that. The Allied imperialists had planned it that way and want to keep it that way. They have planned the same sort of thing for “liberated” France on the morrow of the invasion. The dirty deals of Roosevelt and Churchill, always screened from public view in the preparatory stages, seem amazing and mystifying only if one accepts the premise that this is a war for liberty and democracy. Mystification gives way to true understanding if one accepts the Trotskyist thesis that this war, like the war of 1914-18, is simply a predatory war for imperialist aims.
The material interests involved in the war—the lust for colonies, for markets, for spheres of influence, for profits—are becoming more and more evident. Where in the fanciful picture of a “war for democracy” can one fit Standard Oil’s grab of the oil of Saudi Arabia, the growing Anglo-American rivalry over air transportation, shipping, trade, colonies, or Britain’s flat refusal to return Hong Kong to China when Japan has been defeated? All these things fit into a picture of imperialist war and no other.
In preparing the invasion of Europe, Roosevelt and Churchill are confronted by two sets of problems, one military, the other political. In the purely military sphere they seek the defeat of German imperialism. Politically they are concerned with insuring that vanquishment of their German rival is not followed by social revolution and the downfall of European capitalism.
Supreme confidence in military victory marks all the pronouncements of the Allied camp. Like gangsters about to move into territory held by rival racketeers, they have made every possible preparation to guarantee success for their undertaking. Huge armies have been assembled and trained. Mighty air and sea forces are in readiness. Tremendous stocks of munitions and supplies have been gathered. Just as they display a reckless unconcern over monetary costs so, too, the imperialists are cynically indifferent to the great cost in human life of this tremendous military gamble. Their war juggernaut will have to cross rivers of blood and mountains of corpses to reach its objective. They know this. They have counted and discounted the cost. If in times of peace millions must toil, starve and die to sustain the system of capitalist robbery, of what account are more millions of lives in time of war?
WHAT THEY ALL DREAD THE MOST
But what is to be the result of all this “blood, sweat and tears?” The arrogant confidence which the imperialists display in their military might is not matched by a corresponding spirit in the political domain. Here one discerns a feeling of unease and apprehension. War breeds revolution. They remember the Russian October and the revolutions that swept through Finland, Hungary and Germany after the last war when the workers rose up to put an end to capitalism. And now there is Italy, where a restless, rebellious people are striving to rid themselves of the rotten Badoglio regime.
Will the various underground movements in Europe fold up and disappear when the Allied armies march in? Will the dark cloud of civil war which now hangs loweringly over the Continent simply dissolve, or will it change to the red hue of the socialist revolution? Fear of such a development, amounting almost to certainty, haunts the dreams of the Allied imperialists and gives them no rest, for socialist revolution in Europe will spell doom for world capitalism.
In their arrogance the imperialist gamblers may imagine that armies powerful enough to reduce Hitler’s Festung Europa will be powerful enough to put down revolution and restore capitalist “order.” But how will the workers back home regard the activities of a “liberating” army which becomes a counterrevolutionary police force employed to stamp upon the revolutionary masses? In Russia after the October overturn, American and British troops refused to fight against the Bolsheviks. French sailors mutinied in the Black Sea. British workers formed Councils of Action to prevent shipment of munitions and supplies to the counter-revolutionary forces in Russia. What ground is there for any assurance that these things cannot happen again?
D-Day is near. The invasion armies are poised to strike and the war in Europe moves toward its dramatic climax. Insofar as this is possible, the imperialists have perfected their plans for the military campaign and for suppressing revolution. They have found useful allies in the Stalinists, who are the most venomous betrayers of the revolutionary struggle for Socialism. But the tortured peoples of Europe have not yet spoken. Theirs will be the last word.
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