World War II: an alibi for democratic terror

There can be no doubt today about the crimes of fascism. Above all, the industrialised murder by the Nazi regime of some 11 million human beings, six million of them Jews, still stands as an act of almost unimaginable barbarism, even surpassing the horror of Stalin's gulags in the public imagination.

Yet the reality of these crimes can obscure today the fact that the nations that went to war in 1939, as in 1914, were less divided between fascim and democracy (or even, by 1940, "socialism in one country") than they were united in their fundamentally capitalist nature. And that it was the same forces that drove the world to the bloodbath of 1914, that provoked renewed war in 1939, and which are at work today in the Ukraine, the South China Sea, and Syria - just to name the hottest of today's hot-spots.