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75th anniversary: Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp
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- 21 February 2020 272 hits
May, 1945 was the end of one of the most horrendous capitalist systems the world has suffered. The fascist Nazi government of Germany led by Adolph Hitler was defeated by the communist government of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Today there are many anticommunist lies about World War II, the Nazi period, and especially about the role of the then-socialist Soviet Union in smashing the fascist German forces. As we commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp let’s refute some of those lies.
Liberals and conservatives lie about World War II
The capitalist media never stops rewriting history. In the Public Broadcasting System’s series “The Messengers,” one of the episodes begins with someone saying: “My biggest mistake was to believe that the Red Army won World War II” (PBS, 1995). Actually the Red Army did win World War II. Nine out of 10 German casualties were at the hands of the Red Army.
The liberal PBS is not alone in lying about WW II. In 1995 the “historian” of the U.S. House of Representatives, Christina Jeffrey, was fired when it was publicized that in 1986 she had criticized a school curriculum on the Holocaust by complaining that the perspectives of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were not included in it (New York Times, 1/11/95).
The truth about the Nazis
In 1933, Hitler took power with the support of most of the German bosses. He began what he thought was going to be the “Thousand-Year Reich [empire]”. He ordered the building of the Dachau, Oranienburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. These were the first of what was to become 900 big and small concentration camps that existed until the end of the war. One of Hitler’s first decrees introduced the concept of Schutzhaft – preventive imprisonment of “enemies of the state.” First, last, and always, these were mainly communists.
Hitler was very specific about the role of these camps. “Brutality inspires respect … The masses need someone to inspire fear and make them tremble and submissive … I don’t want concentration camps to become family housing. Terror is the most efficient political instrument ... Those who are discontent and disobey us will think twice before confronting us if they know what is waiting for them in the concentration camps.”
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz
Twelve years later, the Third Reich’s “thousand year” reign of terror was cut short by the communist movement. Around 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front of the advancing Red Army, led by Marshal Ivan S. Konev, saw a sign that read: “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work Makes You Free” – on the top of the main gate of Auschwitz. The Nazis called these death camps “labor camps.” These troops saw with their own eyes what up to then was only a suspicion based on messages smuggled out from the concentration camps: the incarceration and systematic elimination of Jewish and Romani workers, and political “deviates” (read: pro-communists). It was all part of the plan created by the top leadership of the Third Reich, which murdered millions (El Mundo, 1/8/95).
The Red Army troops found 5,000 prisoners. These prisoners were left behind by the Nazis because they were too weak to move (and, in spite of the efforts by the Red Army to save them, many died). A few days earlier, knowing the Red Army was getting closer to Auschwitz, Hitler ordered the camp closed. On January 18, the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel-elite Nazi squadron)–Hitler’s killer-troops—led the “March of Death” of 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners to Buchenwald, another death camp. Thousands of prisoners died on this march.
But the United States had delayed entering World War II for at least a year. They were hoping the Nazis and the Soviet Union would weaken each other. So the 42nd and 45th Divisions of the U.S. Army did not get to the Buchenwald concentration camp until April 11, just a few weeks before the Red Army liberated Berlin and ended the war. But the 5,000 prisoners that remained at Buchenwald had organized a rebellion and had killed most of the SS guards. The same thing happened at Dachau when at 9 a.m. on April 29, dozens of prisoners stopped the SS men from eliminating all the inmates by fighting them. It was not until nine hours later, at 6 p.m., that the 42nd and 45th Divisions entered Dachau and joined the fight, which lasted until the early morning of April 30. 30,000 survived the order, issued by Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s SS, to kill all the prisoners. But it was the rebelling prisoners that saved these lives. Many more would have been saved if the U. S. had not delayed entering the war.
The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis
Today the capitalist regimes in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, deny that the populations of these lands were “liberated” at all (though Jewish organizations continue to insist that the Red Army were indeed liberators). Everything is being done to excuse the Polish, British, French, and U.S. capitalist rulers, who sabotaged all efforts to stop Hitler. Instead, these capitalist rulers urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union and put a stop to the communist movement, and the socialist Soviet Union, which did everything possible to stop the Nazis and whose troops ultimately beat the fascist scum.
Since capitalism manufactures profit wars where young people are ordered to kill and die to defend the bosses, the Progressive Labor Party’s job is to respond to this horror by winning workers to end capitalist war through communist revolution. Our aim is to win workers to fight the bosses, rather than fight one another. To do this we must lead class struggle and fight back against capitalist ideas within the bosses’ armed forces.
From the Vietnam War to the present, PLP members have been in the bosses’ military and among many struggles we helped win the freedom of a Black anti-war soldier falsely accused of killing two officers in Vietnam. Later we organized support for marines in Camp Pendleton who broke up a Ku Klux Klan meeting.
Uncertain of the potential outcomes, young communists deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and fought cynicism by acting with communist convictions. We won enlisted troops to act against the actions of a racist officer. We aided a wounded Iraqi army soldier that other medics refused to treat. We spoke up when officers belittled and racially harassed the lower enlisted. We expressed our opposition to occupation to close friends while on missions intended to maintain the occupation. We shared Challenge and resisted the U.S. military’s racism against workers abroad.
All these actions impacted working class troops in positive ways. For some, communism became a good thing instead of a bad one. Others became open to the idea of a revolutionary movement. A handful of working-class troops took leadership from our party instead of the command, even if it was only for a few short moments. At least one comrade chose not to use deadly force when the command encouraged it. Workers are the ones who suffer when the bosses send us to war. The only way to make a communist difference on the battlefield is to bring our ideas with us.
Fighting the bosses’ ideas inside the bosses military isn’t easy, though it isn’t necessarily easy anywhere given how hard the bosses fight to keep control of capitalism. We’ve made mistakes of all kinds. But we are always learning and the experiences we’ve gained by fighting against capitalist ideas inside the military has helped keep our Party on the road to communist revolution.
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Book review Denial of history to peddle bourgeois socialism
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- 21 February 2020 205 hits
The cover of Economics professor R. D. Wolff’s latest book, Understanding Socialism features a red rose as a symbol of socialist workers struggles indicating that change can come peacefully. This rejects the historic red flag used worldwide today that symbolized the bloodstained bed sheets carried by workers from their deadly battles against their capitalist oppressors.
Wolff describes the two major anti-socialist purges of the 20th century as European fascism and the U.S.-led post World War II cold war. These were in fact capitalist attempts to prevent further worldwide communist revolutions that had already expropriated enormous property, profits, privileges, and power from capitalists since the 1917 Russian working class revolution and founding of the Soviet (workers’ councils) Union.
FDR and socialists save capitalism
Wolff says that the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin’s socialism was a harsh, political dictatorship and praises U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) for his “embrace of socialism” during the Great Depression of 1929-41. During that period of international capitalist collapse, the Soviet Union was the only country with full employment and production while in the U.S. tens of millions were unemployed, homeless, hungry, and marching in the streets for revolution. When FDR sent army tanks against workers occupying Ford auto plants, the workers threatened to burn the factories down if one shot was fired at them. Fearing another 1917 revolution, FDR ran to his capitalist bosses and got them to provide the working class with New Deal benefits in exchange for outlawing communist politics in their unions. Socialists supported the capitalists during this economic crisis helping them survive depression and revolution.
The Soviet Union was the world’s first attempt to build a communist society where everyone was needed and no one was left out. It was a society that fought racism and sexism. The Soviet Union never achieved a communist society because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system like wages and privileges. They also lost millions of their most communist workers in WWII when the Soviet Union’s mighty Red Army destroyed 80 percent of the Nazi armies, the world’s most powerful capitalist military, saved Europe from becoming a Nazi colony and showed the power of an organized working class society to the world that still makes capitalism tremble.
Wolff equates communists with dictatorship. He says they oppose democracy and freedom without defining those terms. The present U.S. champions of democracy and freedom have 1,000 military bases in almost 100 countries that support the sanctioning and bombing into submission of any country that resists domination. It would seem that Wolff opposes dictatorship unless it is coming from the capitalist class.
Socialism preserves inequality
Socialism engages in economic and reform struggles, but its essence and practice has been to enable capitalists to hold onto power during economic crisis, wars, and revolutions. Wolff says, “where once socialist parties represented opposition to capitalism, they have become parties advocating a kinder, gentler private capitalism with a mixture of state capitalism.” Wolff says the socialist principle is “from each according to ability, to each according to their work.” Translated into capitalist economics that means managers and professionals can make hundreds or thousands of times what a worker is paid. This explains why socialist China has the most billionaires and why capitalist world inequality exists where one percent own more than 99 percent of the wealth that workers produce.
The communist principle is ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need.’ Translated into communist economics that means those with greater needs like poorer communities, large families or those with medical problems would receive more.
Capitalism’s socialist allies try to prevent the primary source of communist power which is the working class’s understanding and implementation of communist ideas. Communism requires a communist movement and revolutionary struggles led by today’s communist Progressive Labor Party to end capitalism.
The outbreak of the latest coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, is a health crisis for the working class, a fascist tool for the Chinese bosses, and a racist opportunity for a deteriorating U.S. to attack their top imperialist rival.
What the world’s workers need is a revolutionary communist party. Progressive Labor Party fights to make something unthinkable under capitalism into reality: a system run solely in the interests of the working class. A world where public health will be protected without the barriers of money or profit.
Fascism, the real contagion
Capitalist China has responded to the new coronavirus with intensifying fascism, a form of capitalism in crisis. Under president-for-life Xi Jinping, the Chinese bosses are centralizing their power through their state apparatus: the government, the police, the media. Their goal is to pacify, divide, and terrorize the working class.
In much of China, everyday life has come to a halt. After first downplaying the outbreak and punishing eight doctors who warned about the virus, the rulers quarantined (read: imprisoned) some 50 million in Wuhan and nearby cities. (By comparison, the New York City metropolitan area has about 20 million people). Schools, businesses, theaters, temples, and restaurants are shut down. Supply trucks, with drivers in masks and protective suits, must pass through tightly controlled checkpoints. Police segregate people with fevers. All in all, it’s “the biggest quarantine in history…The impact of such draconian measures has rippled throughout China” (Economist, 1/30).
The Chinese state did what capitalists do best: turn a problem into an Orwellian exercise to ratchet up surveillance of the working class: “Those who have recently been to Wuhan are being tracked, monitored, turned away from hotels and placed into isolation at their homes and in makeshift quarantine facilities” (AP News, 1/30). The government is also publicly urging workers to inform on each other and leak personal data (New York Times, 2/3).
Under the pretext of safety, these tracking and policing measures are in actuality a practice drill for socially controlling the working class and intimidating them into obedience. Similar methods, and the mentality they create, will be useful to the Chinese bosses in a future war against the U.S.
Viral warfare
The world’s driving force today is inter-imperialist rivalry, chiefly between China, Russia, and the U.S. All world problems reflect this contradiction.As national rulers drive to dominate their regions and control
areas of crucial strategic importance, like the Middle East or Africa, the delicate balance of the old liberal world order will inevitably give way to global war.
To distract U.S. workers from obscene capitalist inequality and poverty and the political disorder in their own house (see page 5), bellicose U.S. bosses are taking every opportunity to attack China. U.S.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called out China as “the
central threat of our times,” part of a campaign to pressure U.S. allies to stop collaborating with Chinese tech
giant Huawei (NYT, 1/30).
The coronavirus and mass quarantine could not only “spark China’s first recession-like experience” (Reuters, 2/4), but also renew its prolonged trade war with the U.S. As a result of depressed growth, China may be unable to meet its commitment to buy $200 billion in additional U.S. imports over the next two years (South China Morning Post, 1/29).
Meanwhile, U.S. rulers are busy using the outbreak to their competitive advantage. In banning non-U.S. residents who have traveled to China from entering the U.S., the bosses exceeded recommendations by the World Health Organization (U.S. News, 2/3). And leave it to the capitalists to find a bright side to a growing epidemic: U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross predicted that 2019-nCoV “would cause companies to reconsider their global supply chains and ultimately ‘help to accelerate’ the return of jobs to the United States” (NYT, 1/30).
Even as they kick China while it’s down, these bosses have no leg to stand on when it comes to public health. “In 2017-18 a bad flu season saw symptoms in 45 [million] Americans, and 61,000 deaths” (Economist, 1/30). That doesn’t even factor in the death toll of everyday systemic racism. Ask a Black worker or youth about the medical apartheid in this former enslaver state.
The disease of racism
Universities and news media, agents of disinformation for the ruling class, are seizing the opportunity to infect workers with anti-Chinese racism. “Yellow Alert,” read a French newspaper headline. From Australia’s Daily Telegraph: “China kids stay home.” Shops across Southeast Asia barred entry to Chinese tourists. Canadian parents petitioned to keep students who’d recently visited China out of school. At Arizona State University, students left the classroom when an Asian student sat near them (Washington Post, 2/1).
Anti-Asian racism in the U.S. has historically been a tool of division and war. When Chinese migrants were recruited to build the railroads and mine for gold in the late 1800s, they were superexploited and scapegoated. In the Chinese Massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, a mob mutilated and lynched 18 men and boys, 10 percent of the city’s Chinese immigrant population (Los Angeles Public Library). During World War II, the U.S. funneled more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps.
Workers and youth must fight for multiracial unity in the face of racist ideas wherever they appear.
Communism, the best medicine
All “natural” diseases are in fact caused by capitalism. Communism would eliminate the underlying causes that breed infectious disease, mainly unhealthy working and living conditions. It would use science to handle unforeseen outbreaks in the interest of the masses.
The Chinese Revolution eliminated diseases like syphilis and schistosomiasis. It trained masses of “barefoot doctors” and sent them to the countryside to treat curable illnesses. In just ten years, China doubled workers’ life expectancy and halved infant mortality, the greatest public health gains in history! By organizing the masses, the Chinese Communist Party put an end to famine, female infanticide, foot binding, prostitution, malnutrition, and illiteracy, all previously facts of life for workers and peasants for centuries.
Unfortunately, the Chinese bosses’ abandonment of communist goals and the pursuit of capitalist profit have eroded those landmark advances.
Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by and for the international working class. Freed from profits or bosses, a communist society will organize resources—scientific data, food, water, housing, technology—for the benefit of our class. Join us as we fight to eradicate capitalism, the greatest disease plaguing the working class.
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Facts about 2019-nCoV
The source and severity of 2019-nCoV have yet to be confirmed. The current fatality rate is 2 percent, as compared to more than 9 percent for the SARS virus (Marketwatch, 2/4). Most deaths are in people with weakened immune systems. There is as yet no vaccine.
The World Health Organization, an arm of the U.S. world order, has declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. As we go to press, the official death toll stands at around 500, with tens of thousands of infections confirmed across 27 countries.
Objectively, the common flu is a far greater threat to workers. It “causes up to 5 million cases of severe illness globally and kills up to 650,000 people annually” (The Hill, 1/27)
Los Angeles, February 5–“When the working class is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!” The fight back in Los Angeles this time took the form of a documentary screening and forum against police brutality. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) brought two families together from both coasts to demonstrate the power of multi-racial unity in the fight against racism. The importance of this unity cannot be overstated. Without it, the working class is fragmented and weak. With it, we can smash capitalism for good!
With string lighting and fancy hors d’oeuvres courtesy of the mass organization connections of a comrade, the space looked more like a chic art gallery than a forum on police brutality. But as 85 multi-racial, multi-generational, workers and students filed in, it was clear that everyone meant business. We were all there to unite against police brutality and more importantly how to change this racist system that relies on it to control our class.
Justice for Alex Flores
Only under capitalism can a simple phone call to the police about a concern surrounding a minor altercation end in the murder of someone. That’s exactly what happened to Alex Flores on the morning of November 19, 2019 when he was savagely gunned down by KKKiller cop Steven Ruiz in a South Central neighborhood. Since that date, the family, community members, and members of PLP have held dozens of marches from the site of the shooting to the Newton police station to demand justice.
Throughout that fightback, PLP has reminded the family that every 12 hours someone is murdered by the police. The importance of that discussion has always been to identify the systemic nature of police murders and communism as the only way to achieve true justice. PLP members also told the family of all the organizing we have done against police murder on the east coast and offered to connect them with those struggles.
After two months of PLP organizing with the family of Alex Flores around their fight for justice, we were now able to start to build the coast to coast ties. While planning the event with the family, they wanted to bring more awareness to what happened to Alex, but reiterated multiple times, they didn’t want this to just be about Alex, but rather “all the stolen lives.” Every day this family sees more and more how capitalism robs the working class of our humanity and the only antidote is to unite and overthrow this system.
Police murder means fight back
PLP’s strategy for mobilizing with the family comes from decades of experience of doing this kind of work. The connections we have made with other victims families of police brutality from the Bronx, to Brooklyn to Baltimore, and more supported the struggle here and reinforced the resounding call that “an injustice to one is an injustice to all.” So when the family member of a police brutality victim from New York is willing to fly across the country to show support to the family of Alex Flores and represent PLP and the work we do in the process, it reminds us that our currently small organization has a much wider reach than we often recognize. In fact, our friend from NYC invited two friends and activists living in LA to our event, introducing them to the Party.
After watching the infuriating, yet inspirational, film “Profiled” which spotlights two families who lost people to the murderous 68th Precinct in Brooklyn, NY, we hosted a panel discussion session. Panel members gave detailed accounts about organizing justice for Alex Flores, Brendon Glenn (a homeless man killed by LAPD on Venice Beach) and others murdered by the KKKops.
The important point was made that we cannot rely on having Black and Latin workers as police, judges, mayors, district attorneys, etc. The cop who killed Shantel Davis is Black. The cop who killed Alex Flores is Latin. The LA district attorney, Jackie Lacey, a Black woman, has not indicted a single cop for murder even though roughly 400 people have been killed by LAPD during her eight years in office (The Guardian, 8/24/18). All these people, regardless of skin color, uphold the system of capitalism that continues to brutalize us.
Through the discussion, a Black student/worker and friend reminded the crowd that capitalism will always take back reforms we fight for, so we can never stop fighting to change the system. A 15-year-old Latin student called out the imperialist nature of the United States and another attendee compared the police in our communities to the U.S. military presence in other countries.
One question from the floor was “when is it ok to call the police when you feel unsafe?” The overwhelming consensus of the room was “NEVER.”\Instead, several proposals from the panel and the floor were for taking care of each other and our communities ourselves and that if we lived in a more communist society, we certainly wouldn’t have to fear our own class brothers and sisters.
Onward to May Day
At the end of the night, there was a tremendous feeling of power and desire to get more involved in the fight back. A young Latin mental health care worker found the event inspiring and was blown away by the amount of organizing in the community happening. People took buttons and signed up to attend upcoming rallies and marches. This forum is just one step to making the police killing of Alex Flores a more mass issue. As we shared stories of fighting back against police terror across the country, we showed the family a vision of where their struggle can go and how it can be expanded.
We have a long way to go to get the participants to take the step of joining the PLP in the fight for communism, but this forum was a small step in that struggle. We will continue to organize with the Flores family. Our next major call is for a May Day march through the neighborhood and to report at the May Day dinner of all the fight back between now and then. The struggle for communism continues! Join us!
