Beneath the fog of the People’s War (2012)

Book Review from the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unpatriotic History of the Second World War by James Heartfield. Zero Books (2012).  UK £23.99 / US $42.95.  ISBN: 978 1 78099 378 2

What is it we are asked to ‘remember’ every Armistice Day? ‘Heroism’ of course; ‘sacrifice’ of course; and the inevitable ‘giving’ of lives in a war fought for the cause of ‘peace’ and ‘freedom’. That is the popularly accepted account.

In this reinterpretation of the events surrounding World War Two James Heartfield invites readers to reconsider the accepted victors’ histories of the period. This is not a run-of-the-mill retelling of the official versions produced at the time for popular consumption and reproduced continually ever since as a justification for the carnage. In their place he gives us an unsanitised version of events and an analysis of the fundamental realities behind the conflict that cost sixty million lives and caused almost incalculable destruction of useful constructions (factories, railways, ships, dwellings and other buildings).

It rejects the orthodox accounts of endeavours to liberate Europe, of supposed struggles against evil dictatorships and of battles to end racism. In their place Heartfield amasses a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that the real underlying concerns of the elites who directed the war on both sides related much more to their economic, strategic, and imperial interests. What had formerly been trading wars had by 1939-1945 turned into armed competition over the spoils of exploitation on a world scale. This was a war over markets and access to raw materials as the post-war settlement over spheres of influence made clear.

This was in no way a People’s War. It was a war against people, including, in the words of Arthur Harris the RAF’s chief of Bomber Command, ‘any civilian who produces more than enough to maintain himself.’

What the democracies and the dictatorships had in common was that they had channelled popular aspirations into nationalist and militarist movements. The working-class majority of their populations were successfully persuaded to identify not with class but with country.

Although it does not draw any conclusion regarding the avoidance of future wars, this book is highly recommended as a useful corrective to World War Two history as portrayed on TV and taught in both schools and universities. It makes several of the arguments we ourselves have made even if it does not explicitly draw our conclusion that capitalism and war are inescapably entwined. Only establishing a world of common ownership and production for use will make war a thing of the past.

Gwynn Thomas