The Morning Star reports:
US, French and British troops have marched across Moscow's Red Square for the first time in a Victory Day parade to commemorate the defeat of nazi Germany. The day was marked both by an impressive display of Russia's military might and an emphasis on international co-operation.
More than 26 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died to secure that victory, including more than 8.5m Red Army soldiers.
26 million. It’s a figure that blows your mind away. Yet the Soviet victims of WW2 get very little mention nowadays in the west.
There’s an insidious neo-con inspired campaign to equate the crimes committed under communism with the crimes of Nazism (Seumas Milne has written about it here and here) and to airbrush from history the enormous human sacrificies made by the Russians- and also the Serbs (another people that neocons hate with a vengeance) in the Second World War.
But as Seumas says: “The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives - in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine”
Sixty five years on from the defeat of fascism in Europe, let’s remember the role that the USSR, the UK, the USA, the Serbs and their allies in the various European Resistance movements played in that gallant endeavour.
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