The Myth of D-Day
Greg Butterfield
The myth of D-Day
The Allied invasion of Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, was
certainly not a myth. The soldiers--U.S., British, French, Polish and
others--who landed on the beaches believed they were shedding their
blood to end the nightmare of Nazism.
But when U.S. presidents like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton and
Ronald Reagan travel to the beaches of Normandy to commemorate the
Allied invasion, they rewrite history for the purposes of their own
ruling class today.
President George W. Bush didn't utter the word "Iraq" during the June
6 ceremonies. But everything he said was geared toward building
support for Washington's war drive for imperial empire.
Voice of America reported that the Allied forces fought "for the
noblest of causes--human freedom." And that Bush said, "America would
do it again for our friends."
Then, as now, the Pentagon is not a liberation army motivated by the
noble cause of freedom.
In the early 1930s, the U.S. capitalist class welcomed Hitler's
counter-revolutionary rise to power, because it meant stopping the
socialist revolution in Germany. U.S. investment in Germany soared 45
percent while Hitler was being bankrolled by segments of German
industry and banking to smash the labor unions and unleash anti-Jewish
pogroms.
Some magnates were openly sympathetic to the objectives of German
fascism. They included Henry Ford, J. Paul Getty, Joseph P. Kennedy,
John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen--later head of the CIA.
Big capital in the United States, France and Germany hoped that German
imperialism would aim its gun turrets to the east and attack the
Soviet Union. The Nazis were also eager to crush the Soviet Union
after consolidating their base in Europe.
On June 21, 1941, the German high command launched a devastating
attack on the USSR, code-named Barbarossa. The goal of the military
campaign, according to Hitler, was "the ultimate annihilation of
Bolshevism from the face of the planet."
Washington's position? U.S. Vice President Harry Truman said at the
time, "If Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way
let them kill as many as possible."
In the four years that followed, the Nazis slaughtered 28 million
Soviet soldiers and civilians. Tens of thousands of Soviet towns and
cities, factories and collective farms were destroyed.
The Pentagon brass were more concerned about fighting Japan for the
spoils of exploitation in China, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and
other Asian countries. To the West, the United States and Britain
concentrated their forces against their German-Italian imperialist
competitors in North Africa.
The qualitative turning point in the war was not Normandy but
Stalingrad. In that battle alone more soldiers were killed than the
United States lost in the entire war. In 1943 the battle for
Stalingrad turned the tide. With the mobilization of the entire Soviet
people behind it, the Red Army broke the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
The same year the Soviet Army defeated Hitler's infamous Panzer
divisions in the monumental tank battle at Kursk.
It was the Soviet Army that smashed the German war machine. Its
comrade allies were the Communist-led partisan movements battling the
Nazis in Yugoslavia, Poland, Italy, Belgium, France, Greece, Albania
and elsewhere. The deaths of tens of thousands of Italian soldiers on
the Soviet front ignited mass insurrection in Italy against
Mussolini's fascist reign.
Washington and London were afraid the Red Army and Communist partisans
would liberate Europe, not only from fascism but from capitalism.
That's what motivated their sudden imperialist race to "liberate"
Europe.
Eleven months later, it was the Red Army that raised the red flag of
liberation in Berlin.
While the war was formally ending in Europe, the imperialist war
against socialism and the Soviet Union was beginning a new phase: Cold
War. The first inhumanly brutal act of that phase of war came when the
United States dropped atomic bombs on the civilian populations of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The U.S. ruling class would not allow the Soviet Union to rebuild
after the devastation of World War II. Instead, the USSR was forced to
spend much of its collectively produced wealth to defend itself
against Pentagon atomic and nuclear threats.
While Eastern Europe tried to construct economies on a socialist
basis, Washington turned its occupation of Western Europe into a
nuclear-armed, anti-communist military machine aimed at the USSR.
The Pentagon and State Department actively recruited Nazi war
criminals for anti-Soviet operations against the workers' states in
Eastern Europe.
The U.S. ruling class profited handsomely from World War II. These
capitalists made money hand over fist from military production. U.S.
corporations supplanted their imperialist rivals in Africa, Asia and
the Middle East.
Those are the same kind of riches and profits that propel the U.S. war
drive today in its "noble cause" to seize the oil-rich and
strategically important areas of the Middle East and Central Asia.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper
(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and
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Sailing Away
know about this article. This is written, and posted by a Marxist. This
clown believes America is bad and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were good. He is
an enemy of all free nations, believes in the supremacy of the State over
the People, wants to force everyone in the world to believe in his failed
system, to give all their life energy to the state, to be atheist. He, like
all Communists is willing to kill or imprison everyone that disagrees with
him. He believes the form of government that murdered a hundred million
people around the world during the twentieth century is the way we should
all be ruled. He would have those murders continue.
Communism is a failed system. The USSR is gone, most of the Marxist
dictators around the world are gone. even the ChiComs have "special
economics zones" where they have capitalism so they can support the
communist government and every day they are becoming more and more
capitalist and westernized. Communism is dead, join the real world.
Sorry for ranting here.
"Greg Butterfield" <gr...@wwpublish.com> wrote in message
news:871c377.04061...@posting.google.com...