Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 14:47:58 -0500 (EST)
From: SHAWGI TELL <v600a8e6-AT-ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu>
Subject: Fascism, Nazism, Imperialism



>From an inquiry submitted to CPC-ML:
-----------------------------------

The reader exposes his own ambivalent attitude towards the
suffering and destruction caused by the Second World War with the
following comments: "The war wasn't that black and white. Many
German and Austrian people still revere Hitler because his
war-making got their economy moving again, and gave them
employment. Also, some of the occupied territory was administered
rather democratically and some very ruthlessly."
     Nazism and fascism remain black and white. The first part of
the war was inter-imperialist in which not only the Nazis but their
appeasers also played a destructive role. The second part of the
war from 1941, was the anti-fascist national liberation war and was
certainly black and white. The Hitlerite line on the economy was to
completely destroy it by gearing it mainly to the arming of the
huge Nazi army, and robbing other countries of everything this war
machine needed. The Nazi myth that there was no unemployment was
concocted in order to fool the gullible on the basis that large
numbers of Germans were press-ganged into the army and other
apparatuses of the Nazi war machine, while the minorities and
foreigners were placed in the worst conditions to carry out
production, persecuted and executed. Hitlerites raised the level of
exploitation to an extreme in which people, exhausted and hungry,
had to be dragged from work places to their graves. To have such a
soft attitude towards the Nazi economy is to suggest that the
decision by the world's peoples after the Second World War that
Nazism was an agency of crime against humanity was wrong. This view
of the reader expresses extreme hostility to all the people who
fought to liberate humanity from the Nazi holocaust. It creates
dangerous illusions that the capitalists are not reorganizing a
repeat of such a calamity, and undermines the peoples' resolve that
fascism must be actively opposed.
     As far as the Nazis administering "democratically" the
occupied areas, it would be a laugh if it were not such a sinister
thing to say. The Nazis introduced the scorched earth method of
warfare against all resistance to their rule in the occupied
territories, and the most brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
within Germany itself. It was give in or perish, the carrot or the
stick. The only examples to parallel their savage rule have been
the Japanese swath of destruction through Korea and China, and the
U.S. and Russian imperialists more recently.
     The final comment of the reader continues the insinuation that
CPC(M-L) somehow opposes the truth: "The more you are prepared to
state the truth, the more people will be prepared to listen." We
give our opinions only to elaborate an issue. We let the readers
make up their minds. We base our views on facts of life, on social
science. In the final analysis it is the people who, by engaging in
class struggle and upholding social science, will determine what is
true and what is false.


Shawgi Tell
University at Buffalo
Graduate School of Education
V600A8E6-AT-UBVMS.CC.BUFFALO.EDU





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