Editorial:

Inspiring victory over fascism

The greatest military victory in all history passed unnoticed 
in Australia on May 8. There were no celebrations, no articles in 
major newspaper, no TV coverage to recall the event, no 
acknowledgement by Australia's political leaders. It is as though 
the political establishment wants to bury what happened just 59 
years ago.

The event was the defeat of German fascism and its drive for 
world domination in WWII.

The Western world wants to forget and cover up what actually 
happened because it was the armed forces of the socialist Soviet 
Union that made by far the greatest contribution to this victory. 
Britain, France the United States and other Western countries 
played a much smaller role.

The largest armies ever assembled fought along the thousands of 
kilometres of the western front from the Caucasus mountains in 
the south to the Arctic Circle in the north. Millions of Soviet 
and German soldiers and millions of Soviet citizens lost their 
lives in the conflict.

The Soviet victory was achieved by a country that was building a 
socialist society. At the time of the German invasion of the 
Soviet Union in 1941, Robert Menzies, who was then Prime Minister 
of Australia, declared that the German armies would "go through 
Russia like a knife through butter". How wrong he was.

The victory showed that socialism made a country politically, 
economically and militarily strong.

There are many other consequences of the war that the Western 
capitalist leaders want to forget and cover up so that present 
generations know nothing of how the Nazi armies were defeated or 
that they were defeated at all.

The example of the socialist Soviet Union inspired the working 
people around the world. Their victory and example led to a great 
upsurge in the national liberation struggles in all of the 
colonial countries. The whole colonial system began to crumble 
and a number of countries began to take the socialist path of 
development.

This in turn opened the way to the victory of the Chinese 
revolution and the establishment of the Chinese People's Republic 
in 1949. The Korean people also liberated their country only to 
have half of it overrun by United States troops in the early 
1950s. The Vietnamese people threw out the French armies and then 
defeated the US (and Australian) invaders who also attempted to 
trample on the sovereignty and independence of their newly 
liberated country. The Indonesians threw out the Dutch 
colonialists and the African people forced the Portuguese, 
French, Belgian and British colonialists to get out and go home.

The long struggle of the former colonial countries to preserve 
their sovereignty and independence continues to this day. The 
struggle of the East Timorese people and their government is one 
example. Having liberated their country from Indonesian 
occupation — they are battling to prevent Australia from 
stealing their oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea.

The leaders of the Western world never wanted the complete defeat 
of the Nazi armies. They hoped that both the Soviet Union and 
Germany would exhaust each other in the war and that the Western 
powers would then dictate the peace terms.

The Soviet victory, which took place under the leadership of 
Joseph Stalin, upset their plans and is a main reason why Stalin 
has been continually reviled ever since his death in 1953. He 
proved to be more than a match for Winston Churchill and US 
Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.

For many years after the war ended, the Soviet Union was an 
impassable barrier to all the aggressive plans of the imperialist 
countries. But the Soviet Union is no more, at least for the time 
being. It was brought down by international conspiracies and 
internal treachery.

The breakup of the Soviet Union gave the imperialist powers new 
hopes that they could re-impose their worldwide domination as it 
was in the days of colonialism and before the victory of the 
Russian revolution in 1917.

But a new barrier to imperialism has arisen. It is the superpower 
of people's power. Imperialism cannot turn the clock back. Even 
as they try to ignore and bury the truth of the victory over 
fascism in WWII they cannot escape its world-shaking 
consequences.