By Manuel Raposo
September 17, 2025

September 11, 2025

Raposo is editor of the Portuguese e-zine jornalmudardevida.net. His article tells how and why the ruling classes in the “democratic” imperialist West rewrite World War II history. The rulers’ hypocrisy regarding historical truth is based not simply on petulance but on their sense of desperation regarding the future of their capitalist system while facing the challenges today from the descendants of the forces that defeated Nazi-fascism and Japanese militarism in World War II: the Red Army, the Chinese revolution, the masses ready to struggle for liberation in the Global South and the guerrilla resistance fighters of the working class in countries occupied by Germany. Translation: John Catalinotto 

The celebrations marking the end of World War II, on May 9 in Moscow and Sept. 3 in Beijing, were boycotted by the Western powers. Their deliberate absences from both events 80 years after the war ended allow us to clarify the role of each of the main belligerents in the conflict. We can now dispel some of the persistent myths perpetuated by the imperialist West, not only by highlighting the circumstances surrounding those celebrations but above all by the course of world events in recent years.

Everything seemed to be going well

The first myth concerns the role of the then-existing capitalist powers in 1939 in the fight against Nazism and fascism.

All the efforts of France and Britain (presented since 1939-40 by dressing them up as arch-enemies of Nazi-fascism) were aimed at tolerating and accommodating the political ambitions of Italian fascism and German Nazism in the years leading up to the war. It is now well-known that the rulers of both the British and French empires lived in the hope that the Axis war machine would turn against the USSR and destroy it. This hope was well-founded on Adolph Hitler’s announced intentions to find “living space” [Lebensraum] in the East, that is, in the territory of the USSR and on Benito Mussolini’s thunderous declarations that fascism would break the backbone of communism.

While Italy massacred the peoples of Ethiopia and Libya and occupied Albania, while Germany annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, while fascism erupted in republican and democratic Spain through a bloody civil war armed and aided by Hitler and Mussolini — all was well for the ruling class of the democratic West. The line taken by British and French leaders was to attempt peaceful coexistence with Nazism and fascism.

Across the Atlantic, the U.S. ruling class watched with detachment and interest as destruction unfolded in Europe and also based its strategy on Hitler’s promise to destroy the USSR. Events seemed to be going their way without them having to fire a shot.

A similar situation was unfolding in the Far East in the face of Japanese expansionism, and Japanese imperialism would become the third partner in the Axis. The French, British and U.S. rulers had no reaction to Japan’s invasion of China, which began in 1931, and only committed themselves to the war in the East when Japan threatened European colonial possessions in the region, and U.S. military bases in the Pacific were attacked.

Keeping the greatest sacrifices in the shadows

A second myth has been perpetuated around the sacrifices made by Western capitalist countries to defeat Nazi-fascism. The numbers speak for themselves.

More than 30 million Chinese people were killed between 1931 and 1945 before Japan was defeated. Around 27 million Soviets perished from 1941 to 1945 in what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. In Belarus alone, as shown in Elem Klimov’s masterful film “Come and See,” more than 5,200 villages were wiped out by the Nazis, out of a total of 9,200 villages in the USSR. The 600,000 French, 800,000 British, and 400,000 U.S. military and civilian deaths were small in comparison, not to mention the degree of physical destruction of the countries, which was nil in the U.S. and much less in France and Britain than in the East.

Still on the subject of sacrifices, the Western powers systematically omit those they themselves imposed on Africans and Asians, who were conscripted from the many European colonies of the time and taken to the battlefronts in Europe, North Africa and Asia. More than a million Africans and 350,000 Asians, mainly Indians [from the British colonies, now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar], were forcibly mobilized and mistreated.

The colonial conscripts were used as cannon fodder more than any others, and they died in the thousands (87,000 Indians alone) for causes that were not in their interest, without even being granted a mention in the history of the war as told by Europeans and the U.S. And in the postwar period, these same peoples (India, Indochina, Algeria, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Nigeria, Senegal and other French colonies, etc.) had to face even more brutal colonial violence when they rose up in the national struggles for independence.

The very specific anti-fascism of the imperialist democracies

Another myth was built around the idea that the liberal democracies of the West were, by nature, visceral enemies of Nazi-fascism.

Let us remember, for example, Winston Churchill’s enthusiastic admiration and praise (he was later extolled as a model democrat, patriot and anti-fascist resistance fighter) for Mussolini and the Italian fascist regime before the war began. Let us recall the fact that it was the democratic regimes themselves, through their right-wing sectors, that paved the way for both Mussolini and Hitler to come to power.

Let us also remember the shameful “neutrality” of France and Britain in the face of the Spanish Civil War, which allowed Francisco Franco’s victory as a prelude to the world war. Let us not forget that for four years, from 1940 to 1944, half of France — ironically called “Free France” because it was not militarily occupied by Germany — was ruled by a government [in Vichy] that collaborated fully with Nazism.

It was not questions of principle regarding their respective political regimes that opposed capitalist democracies to fascism and Nazism — it was the historical circumstances of the time that placed them on opposite sides. As we have seen, neither Hitler’s expansion of Germany to the east nor Mussolini’s expansion of Italy into North Africa nor Japan’s expansion into Chinese territory greatly disturbed Western leaders.

What awakened in them the need to go to war was, quite specifically, the fact that the ambitions of the Axis powers threatened the empires of France and Britain, threatening to replace them as rulers of their colonial possessions and clashed with the growing imperial ambitions of the United States.

To avoid greater evils

It was therefore with extreme reluctance and much foot-dragging that the bourgeois democratic regimes accepted an alliance with their true class enemy, the USSR, when their natural allies would have been the Nazi and fascist bourgeois regimes — if these had strictly fulfilled the role expected of them by Western leaders, which was to “end communism.” Specifically, it was to overthrow the Soviet regime, divide Russia into pieces and stifle the growing popular revolution in China.

France, Britain and the U.S., therefore, entered the war, because they had become targets of the Axis powers, despite all the concessions they had made to them, strictly speaking, since fascism took hold in Italy in 1922, Nazism in Germany in 1933 and Japanese fascism in the early 1930s.

Once war broke out in Europe in 1939, it was not until mid-1944 that the democratic capitalist powers decided to open a western front [in Normandy in June 1944] that would put Hitler’s forces between two fires, a demand that the USSR had been making all along. This belated decision was forced by Germany’s virtual defeat after the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk (1942-43). These victories gave the USSR a strategic initiative in the war that it would hold to the end. It was the Russian advance, seen as a threat to their class interests, that made the Western leaders decide to open a second front.

For imperialist capitalism, with their hope of seeing the USSR defeated by the Nazis dashed, the “specter of communism,” of which the Communist Manifesto spoke in 1848, once again haunted not only Europe but the world. The imperialists believed this specter had to be contained, since it could not be crushed.

In the Far East, the same course of action was taken. The U.S. entered the war against Japan after being provoked in its Hawaiian colony in late 1941, ten years after China began to suffer the hardships of Japanese military occupation and two years after the Soviet army, with the support of Mongolia, defeated Japanese forces in the far east of Siberia in May-August 1939.

The main target of the imperialist powers, clearly identified since 1917, was not fascist and Nazi extremism but what they called “communism,” then embodied in the USSR and later in revolutionary China. The power of the proletariat and the popular classes — and what this could represent as a “bad example” for the peoples of the whole world — was above all what frightened the capitalist bourgeoisie.

It frightened them much more than the power of the right-wing extremists, for the obvious reason that the latter were of the same class family: bourgeois, capitalists and imperialists. Competition for the same goal — the division and domination of the world, the subjugation of the peoples of all continents — is what made them adversaries.

This is what made World War II a war between imperialist powers, just as the war of 1914-18 had been, concluding a 30-year cycle of confrontations over the division of the world that shaped imperialist capitalism as we know it today.

The rapid end of a forced alliance

It is not surprising, then, that as soon as hostilities ended, that alliance of circumstance [of the West with the USSR] was broken. In its place, the capitalist West sought to erect an “iron curtain” (the expression is Churchill’s, uttered in a speech in the U.S. in March 1946) between the Western world and the Soviet world. And it immediately launched — notably with the creation of NATO and the Bretton Woods institutions, which would consummate U.S. dominance — a “Cold War” aimed at containing the USSR and the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe, with a view to defeating them.

The conviction of some of the leading Nazi leaders in Nuremberg did not prevent many others (politicians, military personnel, police officers, scientists) from being recruited by Western regimes. The methods of the so-called “scientific police” developed by the Nazis became part of the manuals of “democratic” police forces (and some that were not so “democratic,” such as the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE), which applied them extensively in subsequent colonial wars — in Algeria, Indochina, Africa and later in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Fascist regimes such as those in Portugal and Spain were maintained without question and welcomed by their democratic counterparts, to the point that Salazar’s Portugal was honored as a founder of NATO.

The Great Wall that was believed to exist between capitalist democracies and fascist regimes simply never existed. In 1939-45, the then-dominant imperialist capitalists had to unfurl the flags of democracy, freedom, parliamentarianism and human rights in order to reluctantly wage a war, in reality fratricidal [that is, regarding class], against the imperial ambitions of Nazism and fascism.

Return to the present

The historical facts recalled above take on new significance when viewed through the prism of current events.

For eight decades, the U.S. has relentlessly pursued a campaign of military expansion, the most recent act of which was the attempt to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, turning it into a spear pointed at Russia. In the Middle East, they inherited from the British the mercenary state of Israel to control the region’s energy resources and dominate the links between Asia, Europe and Africa. In the Far East, they surrounded China with military bases in the hope, which is proving frustrated, of containing Chinese growth.

Throughout the world, they are also trying, with signs of failure, to block organizations and political initiatives that form outside their sphere of influence. With their economic, political and ideological capabilities in decline, they are exacerbating the use of violence (from coups d’état to economic sanctions) and choosing to install chaos where they cannot dominate [Libya, Iraq].

On the European side, the formation of the European Union, presented as a solution for eternal peace among member countries, did not prevent Europe from promoting the breakup of Yugoslavia, a country that had resisted the siren songs of the EU. Nor did it prevent the EU imperialists from playing an active role in the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. Nor did it make the EU hesitate to collaborate in NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.

Nor does it prevent it from inciting Ukrainian extremists to continue the conflict that the West ignited, even after signs of a U.S. retreat. Nor does it divert it from its purpose of sacrificing European populations to carry out the militarization of the continent. Nor does it prevent the EU from maintaining its support for the terrorist regime of Israel, even in the face of genocide carried out openly and without veils.

Fascist democracies and democratic fascisms

The current cases of Ukraine and Israel are perfect examples of the duplicity, which can be called democratic-fascist, of the imperialist powers.

Before Russian troops entered Ukraine in 2022, the anti-democratic nature of the regime, widespread corruption, the danger posed by Nazi organizations in the country and their influence in institutions were openly and widely exposed in the Western media. This would seem to be enough to rule out Ukraine’s candidacy for the European Union. But no.

After the invasion, not only were all these accusations silenced, but the Ukrainian regime began to be presented as an advanced guard of freedom and democracy in Europe, for which all Europeans should fight and pay the heavy bills of war. The battalions of Ukrainian Nazis were presented as patriots and heroes. Zelensky, a corrupt jack-of-all-trades with no backbone, was held up as a determined democratic icon.

Faced with October 7, 2023 — which was, objectively, in the light of international law enshrined by the U.N., a legitimate military operation by the Palestinian resistance to the illegal occupation of Gaza — European and U.S. regimes have embraced Israel’s difficulties by granting it a “right to defend itself” that, as an occupier, Israel does not have and by giving it all the means (political, financial and military) to massacre the population of Gaza and the West Bank.

More than 64,000 Palestinian deaths, overwhelmingly civilians, the complete destruction of Gaza, hunger and disease as weapons of war, the theft of Palestinian land by fascist-minded settlers, the hatred distilled without restraint by Israeli torturers — none of this is reason enough for the U.S. and European ruling classes to put an end to Israel’s war crimes.

It is tempting to draw parallels. The abduction of Ukrainian citizens in the middle of the street to forcibly incorporate them into the army is reminiscent of the forced mobilization of Africans and Asians, Romanians, Bulgarians and others during World War II. Tolerance of Israeli Nazism has its antecedents in passivity in the face of Nazi-fascist massacres of communists, resistance fighters, Jews, Roma, homosexuals and disabled people.

The destruction of Gaza is comparable to the gratuitous bombing of Guernica, Dresden or Hiroshima. The genocide of the Palestinians is in line with the napalm massacres of the Algerians, the Vietnamese, the Koreans or the Angolan strikers of Baixa do Cassange [a 1961 massacre that launched Angola’s war of liberation]. The torture and murder of Palestinian prisoners draws on the practices of Auschwitz, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib or the death of Germano Vidigal at the hands of the PIDE, recreated by Portuguese author and Nobel laureate José Saramago in “Levantado do Chão” [“Raised from the Ground”].

These days are different

It is worth asking why regimes such as those in Europe and the U.S., which claim to hold the highest respect for democracy, freedom and human rights, support and feed regimes such as those in Kiev and Tel Aviv, which are openly anti-democratic, racist, restrictive of freedoms and violators of the most basic human rights.

The answer can only be: they are useful to them. This was stated by German Chancellor [Friedrich] Merz when he acknowledged that Israel “does our dirty work,” and he could, by the same token, extend the idea to the war that Zelensky is waging in Ukraine. (aa.com/tr, June 18)

The extreme right-wing forces that today lead Ukraine and Israel are not mere allies that Western powers have under their protection: They are the advance guards of contemporary imperialism. Just as the hordes of Hitler, Mussolini and [the Japanese Emperor] Hirohito were at one time useful to them in their crusade against the freedom of peoples and the sovereignty of countries — and above all against those terrible phantoms known as socialism and communism — so too are renewed fascist and Nazi extremism instruments of the imperialist forces in the struggle they are waging, with signs of desperation, to hold on to the power over the world that they have forged over the last 80 years.

There is one notable difference these days. Imperialist capitalism has entered its downward curve. Its efforts are not for expansion but for survival of their system of exploitation. Its sphere of influence is shrinking as other powers show their ability to stand up to it, bringing together countries that until recently were subordinate to the command of imperialist capital, with no way out.

It is also to mask this present-day truth — this change underway in today’s world — that it is useful to the imperialist West to distort the history about the protagonists of World War II. By downplaying the decisive role that the Soviet and Chinese peoples played or the African and Asian peoples played or the resistance fighters in each country occupied by Germany or Japan played in defeating Nazi-fascist brutality, they hide the role that all peoples in general can play in today’s struggle against imperialist capital and the resurgence of fascism — independently and above the heads of the bourgeoisies that dominate them.