[D66] “harsh peace”

[R.O.]

wsws.org:

75 years ago: Fourth International warns of Allied plans to impose a 
“harsh peace” on ruined Europe

Less than a week after the formal surrender of Nazi Germany on May 7, 
the world Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, warned of the 
determination of the Allied powers, including the United States, Britain 
and the Soviet Union, to impose a “harsh peace” upon Europe directed 
against the revolutionary strivings of the masses.

A lead article in The Militant, the newspaper of the American Socialist 
Workers Party, noted that the war had come to an end after claiming more 
than double the number of casualties as the First World War in Europe. 
“Over the European continent hangs a ghastly pall of death and 
devastation, the ‘peace’ of the charnel house and the grave. This is the 
price the peoples are paying for the imperialist struggle to decide 
which coterie of capitalist gangsters shall dominate and exploit 
mankind,” it stated.

Against those who asserted that the end of the war would result in an 
era of peace and prosperity, the article warned: “Ruined Europe cannot 
even feed the multitudes of its hungry inhabitants, let alone house and 
clothe them. To the toll of millions of lives which the imperialist war 
has already exacted, must be added those now doomed to death by disease 
and starvation. They include the children, unnumbered millions of them, 
who are suffering from acute hunger and afflicted with rickets and other 
maladies of malnutrition.”

It noted that the primary concern of the Allied powers was to prevent a 
threat to capitalist rule in Germany, where the bourgeoisie had fled and 
capitalist state structures lay in ruin, and throughout Europe.

The article warned that the Allies “intend to keep large forces in 
Europe. For all the fine talk about ‘democracy’ and the right of every 
nation to choose its own government, the Allies have no intention of 
allowing the European peoples to determine their own future. As they 
have already done in Greece, Italy and Belgium, they intend to saddle 
the rest of Europe with reactionary dictatorships, propped up by Allied 
arms, so that the masses may be held in permanent subjection to the 
decayed capitalist system.”

The mention of Greece referred to the role of British troops in 
violently suppressing anti-fascist partisans at the beginning of the 
year, after they had overthrown the country’s German-aligned 
dictatorship. In Italy, Britain and the US had demonstrated their 
willingness to work with those sections of the fascist ruling elite, 
who, late in the war, had recognized that Benito Mussolini was no longer 
able to serve the interests of the capitalist class.

The Fourth International also pointed to the perfidious role of the 
Soviet bureaucracy and the Stalinist communist parties internationally. 
While the Soviet Red Army had played the decisive role in the military 
defeat of Nazi Germany, the bureaucracy was allied with the western 
imperialist powers and had already concluded agreements with them for 
the carve-up of Europe and the world into a series of spheres of influence.

This was directed above all against the emerging revolutionary movement 
of the working class that the Stalinists feared would trigger social 
upheavals against their own police-state forms of rule.