TODAY, in the midst of what even our rulers describe as the worst crisis since 1945, the people of Britain will be enveloped in a cloud of toxic ideological matter ejected from the British state’s propaganda vents. 

The country continues to reel under the Covid-19 crisis: its death toll now the highest in Europe; its dilapidated social and economic infrastructure — asset-stripped by years of neoliberal reform — brutally exposed; the corruption, complicity and complacency of its ruling class on show for all to see. 

What better time, therefore, to dust off the gilded upholstery of the monarchic state, wheel out the monarch to intone about our shared heritage in the British wartime spirit, put Churchill’s speeches on repeat and start mainlining conservative nostalgia?

Ironically of course, the dirty truth is that Britain’s pre-war strategic alliance with nazi Germany was a major cause of the war and it was facilitated not by the tactical errors of a few “guilty men” but by a powerful faction within British state monopoly capitalism as part of a strategic debate about how best to defend Britain’s imperial position. 

As the writer Ivor Montagu showed in detail in his 1940 broadside The Traitor Class, household names of the British aristocracy and their finance and industrial capital allies lined up not just to praise German fascism but to build it, rearm it and attempt to point it at the Soviet Union. 

We will hear little of that tawdry episode in the course of today’s state-authorised pieties.

Similarly, expect the ruling class to co-opt the role of the British people in the war effort that followed: the ramping up of industrial production; the genuine collective effort described by Angus Calder in The People’s War and, of course the role of mass working-class organisations in laying the basis for the progressive elements of post-war reconstruction. 

If they are expressed at all, they will be subsumed within a story of a wonderful national effort, an example to us today peddled by a ruling class that was pretty late to the party.

VE Day is an opportunity to remember the people who died in the cataclysmic war against fascism. 

But it’s also a battlefield of ideological struggle in itself and the working-class movement needs to be on that field because the far right and the fascists are on the march again.

As big business and finance capital seek to rebuild political rule in the context of financial crisis, recession, stagnation, pandemic and growing outbreaks of discontent, they will explore a number of strategic options, one of which is the rehabilitation of fascist barbarism. 

Fascist parties and their fellow travellers are now part of the political fabric of the European Union, while extreme authoritarians with fascist sympathies govern some of the largest states on the planet. 

Rehabilitating fascism requires a significant effort of historical revisionism.

First of all, nazism must be separated from the wider political phenomenon of fascism. The latter must be forgotten and the case must be made that the former was exceptional. The history of European fascism must be erased. 

Yet it was fascist control of state power in Spain, Italy and Germany and fascist expansionism that drove Europe towards a cataclysmic war. 

Equally, the appalling atrocities that took place across Europe, the mass killing of political opponents, ethnic Slavs, homosexuals, Roma people and of course the genocide of Jews were not only the work of German nazism. 

They were actively supported by fascists and their sympathisers in Holland, Vichy France, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Baltic states, while Franco’s fascists murdered an estimated 200,000 political opponents after their victory over the Spanish Republic. 

Secondly, the role of communists in the second world war must be obscured, traduced and hidden from history. 

In eastern Europe, where the parties of the far right are firmly entrenched, this is rampant. 

In Ukraine and Poland, distribution of communist materials now carries a custodial sentence. 

The legislation in Poland is currently being used to prosecute the Polish Communist Party’s paper, because of the display of communist symbols and the content contained in articles. 

The editors face up to three years in prison if found guilty. The battle to erase memory is just as fierce: monuments and post-war memorials to communists, the Red Army and anti-fascists are pulled down and destroyed and new ones to the memory of the “victims of communism” or to nationalist heroes, sometimes fascists, are put up. 

A concerted drive is being made across Europe and beyond to conceal the role of fascism causing the second world war and to lay it at the feet of the Soviet Union through the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. 

This tactical last resort is ripped from its historical context, made into the cause of the war and cited as a prime example of the joint responsibility of nazi and communist “totalitarianism.”

The notion that there is a thing called “totalitarianism” is a staple of post-war liberal thought. 

As Slavoj Zizek argued back in 2001, the concept is helpful for the Establishment because “instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking.” 

In the present case, what it does is obscure the very different political and social content of communism and fascism. 

Once their equivalence is established by representing them as deviations from liberal democratic norms, it’s possible to push the argument further and conduct a game of bodycount politics in which the aim is to add together all the deaths, or even the non-births, that took place in 70 years of socialism until the number is bigger than the Holocaust. 

Then, preferably, multiply it again. This infantile politics is designed to make genuine discussion impossible.  

There is no equivalence between the Soviet Union and nazi fascism and nothing should be conceded to any argument that there was. 

For all the political repression, the Soviet Union was an immense collective endeavour that had a transformative effect on its own peoples, dramatically narrowing inequality and enabling industrialisation to the point where its factories could, crucially, outstrip German production. 

And of course, it played a key role in the anti-colonial struggles that brought to an end the obscene European territorial empires of the 20th century. 

It is possible and necessary to pursue a balanced view of Soviet communism.

The record of fascism requires no such nuance. Fascist parties and governments repressed worker organisations, normalised anti-semitism and racism, euthanised disabled people, castrated homosexuals, sought to establish entire economies on the basis of slave labour, practised the most brutal colonialism and of course conducted militarised murder and genocide on an industrial scale. 

This orgy of barbarism was not just the work of Hitler, but of the followers of Franco, Mussolini, Stepan Bandera and a host of minor fascist glitterati across Europe.   

The anti-communist offensive was a political fact before the Covid-19 crisis but with the ratcheting up of US imperialist bellicosity toward China and the awkward fact of that country’s demonstrably superior response to the pandemic, we can expect it to escalate further. 

Nor should we be surprised that such lies emanate from the modern-day heirs of the noble lords and captains of industry who fawned over Hitler. 

But we should be deeply disturbed that Europe’s social democrats, including leading figures in the Labour Party, are gamely repeating them. 

For example, back in September Europe’s social democrats voted en masse for a resolution that repeated every distortion, erasure and outright lie outlined above.

When I raised this with my (Labour) MEPs, one of them wrote back to me anxious to reassure me that they were being even-handed and honouring everyone who fought fascism and totalitarianism. 

As I pointed out to them, it didn’t matter what they thought they were doing, the text they signed up to was an apology for fascism and an unforgivable stain on the countless communists and others who gave their lives in the fight against fascism: the International Brigades, those who formed the backbone of Europe’s resistance movements, and of course the historically unparalleled Soviet economic and military effort that actually won the war, not to mention the millions of civilians, mostly in the Soviet territories, who died as a consequence of fascist barbarism. 

It was a supreme act of idiocy for anyone considering themselves a progressive to vote for such a resolution alongside conservatives and fascist sympathisers at a time of such global danger. Yet the social democrats did it, with impressive unity.

The labour movement must wage a battle over historical memory against the lies and distortions that conceal the real role of the ruling class in the drive to war, colonise the role of working people in the achievement of victory, and which smear and erase the role of the world communist movement in defeating fascist barbarism. 

This may involve something like the kind of ideological popular front work that took place before the second world war itself, winning broad sections of society to isolating the forces pushing toward fascism.

And for their part, social democrats need to wake up. Across the globe the centre ground of politics is being torn apart. 

Conservatives are fleeing to their right in search of renewed electoral success and today’s bewildered Social Democrats are trailing in their wake, falling over themselves to equivocate while the far right seeks to extinguish left forces and workers’ movements. 

For as long as they cling to the notion that nazism and communism are part of a shared “totalitarianism,” social democrats and liberals alike will serve only to hand power to the fascists. The fascists won’t repay the compliment.