Scottish Labour's leaders cannot keep blaming Westminster for the collapse at the ballot box, says VINCE MILLS
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Blood and Ruins: how imperial jealousy fuelled WWII
An authoritative new work by Richard Overy argues that the war was fuelled by upstart Axis powers' desire for their own empires and the Allies wanting to defend their established colonial regimes. Correct, says JOHN ELLISON — but there are some other mistakes
Japanese troops invade China, 1931, leaving behind a puppet state
Over 30 years since apartheid was abolished, nasty anti-migrant rhetoric sweeps the corporate media. The Commnunist Party is ready to fight back, says ROGER McKENZIE
Over 100,000 people are expected on Brussels’s streets today. Ben Chacko speaks to Belgian Workers Party’s PETER MERTENS on wage and pensions attacks that have united the fightback
FRED BAYER says the cuts to the congress cycle could be disastrous for the Scottish trade union movement
Berlin’s Soviet war memorials are becoming the latest front in a political struggle to ‘de-Sovietise’ German history. NICO POPP reports
Western Marxism is a particular version of Marxist theory developed in – and acceptable to – the capitalist nations of Europe and North America and largely divorced from political action, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
THE text of Richard Overy’s weighty new history of World War II runs close to 900 pages. Follow-up footnote source references add another 75 pages or so. Packed with facts and scholarly analysis, reinforcing his earlier works such as Russia’s War, its insights, clarity and objectivity are formidable.
Most of the first half is given over to the story of the war. Overy views the war, as it advances, from the standpoint of the rulers of the chief countries involved, building into the account their respective dilemmas, decisions, strategies and the reasons for these.
The rest of the book explores successively how resources were mobilised, military realities and developments, the organisation of economies, the justifications advanced for war, civilian resistance and political change sought, the psychiatric impact, war crimes and atrocities and finally, transition into a post-war world in which the Axis powers had failed in their objectives and in which the US was now the world’s most powerful country.
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The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON
RON JACOBS salutes a magnificent narrative that demonstrates how the war replaced European colonialism with US imperialism and Soviet power