On May 8, 1945, at 11:01 pm Central European Time – already May 9 in the USSR – the German surrender took effect, ending World War II in Europe. The war with Germany and her fellow members of what we now call fascist allies in Europe – Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Slovakia and Finland – had already claimed the lives of perhaps 50 million people. In the ensuing years, oceans of ink have been spilled by right-wing historians and polemicists in an attempt to distort or even minimize the significance of this date. The purpose of this rewriting of history is in some cases to defend fascism, but in many more it is simply to diminish the prestige of the Soviet Union, the first socialist state. We think it is appropriate to call to mind a few facts.

First, the Nazi empire was guilty of the most astounding crimes, some without any real parallel in history. Over the summer of 1944, some 400,000 Hungarian Jews – almost the whole Jewish population of Hungary – were transported by rail to Auschwitz, a death camp the Nazis had built in occupied Poland, and murdered, down to the last child. Most were gassed, but history records that many of the children were thrown alive into crematory fires – sometimes more than a thousand children were killed this way in a single day. In all, 6 million Jewish people were murdered in the most efficient genocide campaign the world has had the misfortune to witness. Many millions more were murdered among the Romani, Slavic and other peoples the Nazis considered racial inferiors and among Soviet prisoners of war. Still hundreds of thousands more were murdered among people with disabilities, sexual minorities and other targeted groups.

Second, the capitalist world was for a long time complacent about the rise of Nazism. The governments of France, England and Poland stood idly by while Hitler annexed first Austria and then Czechia. The cost of this was enormous. Almost half the tanks used by the Nazis in the conquest of France were built at the Skoda works in occupied Czechia. And this was not an isolated case. Even with Hitler's racism on full display, the democratic governments of Europe were far more concerned with his value as a bulwark against socialism.

Third, it was the Soviet Union which, from the beginning, was the main enemy of Nazi Germany. What we now know as the Axis originally called itself the Anti-Comintern Pact. Long before what is widely considered the start date of World War II, Soviet soldiers had already fought bloody battles against German and Italian fascists in Spain, and against Japanese militarism in Manchuria. Throughout the period of appeasement by the capitalist powers, the Soviet government urged the strongest possible resistance to Nazi aggression, even going as far as to offer one million Soviet soldiers for the defense of Czechoslovakia – an offer which Czechoslovakia would probably have accepted, but the Polish government refused to allow transit or supply of this army through their country. The period of the non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR was an emergency measure, agreed by the Soviets only when it was clear they would otherwise be standing alone against Germany and might have to fight a second front against Japan. Throughout the period of this pact, the Soviet government and people frantically built weapons, constructed defenses, and organized and prepared for the decisive confrontation they knew very well was only a matter of time.

Fourth, the decisive sacrifices and the decisive victories in the war against Nazi Germany occurred on the Eastern Front. Casualty figures compiled by the German military showed that between the start of the war and January 31, 1945, 3.5 million of the 4.4 million German casualties had occurred on the Eastern Front. The single Battle of Stalingrad cost the Germans as many casualties as the entire fighting in France, including both 1940 and 1944. When the German invasion of the USSR began in the summer of 1940, the Soviets faced 3.8 million soldiers and 7000 armored vehicles. When the Western Allies made their greatly delayed landing in Normandy, they faced only 600,000 men and 2000 armored vehicles. Worse for the Germans, the crack Nazi units which had conquered France in six weeks in 1940 had been destroyed in the battles on the Eastern Front and rebuilt with raw recruits. In sacrifice, the USSR lost 27 million of her citizens in the war – by far the most of any country in the European conflict. Many of them were killed in combat, but millions more were murdered in prisoner of war camps and concentration camps or were among the civilians massacred or starved by the invaders.

Fifth, the Soviet victory in World War II was possible only due to socialist construction. In World War I, the Russian empire fielded by far the weakest army of any of the major powers. Though it had an almost unlimited supply of soldiers, its level of training, organization, and equipment was disastrously bad. During World War II, in every single year, the newly industrialized USSR outproduced Germany – at the time, Europe's premier industrial power – in every major category of war material – planes, tanks, cannons, rifles, machine guns. This tremendous advantage in war material was key to the Soviet ability to resist and ultimately defeat an invasion force which had completely conquered Belgium and France – at the time, a major military power in her own right – in just six weeks.

The reality is that the Soviet Union was the most consistent and dangerous enemy of fascism, the worst evil that Europe has ever suffered, and Soviet efforts and the strength of the USSR were key to fascism's defeat. This fact was not lost on many people in 1945, and certainly not on the handful of survivors of Auschwitz concentration camp liberated by the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division on January 31 of 1945.

No objective evaluation of socialism is possible without an objective evaluation of the real world history of socialism. In the long list of accomplishments of real world socialism to date, we must prominently include playing the key role in the defeat of Nazism.

#UnitedStates #International #Asia #Europe #Nazis #WorldWarII #Socialism #Antifascism #Russia #SovietUnion

30 years later, Japanese Americans mobilized around a movement for redress and reparations. The American-born children of Japanese immigrants (the Nisei) joined with their children’s generation (the Sansei) to fight for and win an official government apology and monetary payments, the two goals of the movement. Despite the move to the right during the Reagan administration, the Japanese American community was able to combine grassroots protest, a broad united front of Japanese American organizations and individuals, as well as allies among African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, and progressive whites to win victory after a more than ten-year fight.

More than 15 years ago, Japanese Americans were among the first to rally to side of American Muslims who were targeted by the federal government with a special registration of people from majority-Muslim countries. Right-wingers in and around the Bush administration openly spoke of the need to get over the World War II concentration camps in order to clear the way for more persecution of American Muslims.

Now the xenophobia of Donald Trump is going far beyond the bad times following the passage of the so-called Patriot Act in 2001. His travel ban on people from seven Muslim majority countries included not only refugees but legal permanent residents and even American citizens with dual citizenship. But his executive order was met by massive protests at airports across the country where people were being denied entry to the U.S. and has now been put on hold by afFederal judge.

Today, Feb. 17, I just learned of a memo being circulated in the Trump administration that proposes to mobilize up to 100,000 National Guard to carry out another executive order by Trump that targets up to 8 million undocumented immigrants for deportation. The use of military force to carry out the mass removal of immigrants would be an unprecedented step not seen in the U.S. since the dark days of the World War II concentration camps.

Now more than ever Japanese Americans need to step up their resistance to Trump’s attacks on Muslims, Mexicans and others. We need to share not only our suffering and resistance in the concentration camps, but also the hope and knowledge gained from our fight for redress and reparations.

Gambatte Kudasai! (Please Struggle!)

Masao Suzuki is a member of the San Jose Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC), which is sponsoring their 37th Annual Day of Remembrance event on Sunday, Feb. 19.

#SanJoséCA #AntiwarMovement #ImmigrantRights #PeoplesStruggles #WorldWarII #Antiracism

Last year, I might have thought of Stalingrad as an interesting history lesson. But when I sat down in the theater to watch the new Russian war epic last weekend, all I could think about was the crisis in Ukraine.

In less than four months time, the world watched a large, right-wing movement in Ukraine force a democratically elected government from power and replace it with a coalition ranging from far-right oligarchs to out-and-out Nazis. Russia responded to the new fascist-led government by condemning the undemocratic takeover and stationing troops in Crimea, a small region in the southeast of Ukraine comprised of a majority ethnic Russians.

The move by Putin drew condemnation from all the usual players in the Western world, including U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While Russia defends its defensive posture out of concern at the fascist takeover, pundits in the West ridicule them and downplay the very real threat of a fascist Ukraine, the largest country on Russia's western border. The New York Times, for instance, ran an op-ed titled “Putin's Phantom Pogroms,” that argued – against all evidence – that Russia's concern was a cynical ploy to dominate Ukraine. Funny, of course, for a newspaper that has a history of defending the U.S.'s many wars of aggression.

But the threat of fascism in Ukraine matters a lot to the Russian people, and movie-goers in the U.S. would do well to see Stalingrad to better understand why.

Stalingrad focuses on a small band of Soviet soldiers trying to defend a key neighborhood from the Nazi invaders. The neighborhood is situated in front of a major Red Army supply route, making the stakes incredibly high. Made up of a few sailors and the survivors of a war-weary combat unit, the group makes a courageous stand against the German occupation at great cost to themselves.

You see the devastation wreaked by the Nazis on the Soviet Union on full display in the film. The neighborhood where the bulk of the film takes place is full of wreckage and dilapidated buildings. Food is scarce, and fresh water is even harder to find. Having executed most of the men left in the city, the Nazis regularly terrorize women and children in the most barbaric ways, giving the audience a glimpse of the horror of Nazi occupation. They rape Soviet women, withhold food and basic goods from the population, and forcibly relocate entire neighborhoods of people.

In one particularly disturbing scene, a sadistic German lieutenant orders all of the women and children in the neighborhood to line up at gun point. He randomly accuses a darker skinned woman and her child of being Jewish, and the Nazi soldiers force them into a wooden structure and burn them alive. Other films on Nazi occupation explore this element of fascist violence, like the 1985 Soviet film Come and See, but Stalingrad shows how these acts of barbarism outraged ordinary working people enough to give their lives in order to drive the Germans back to Berlin. Anyone following the events in Ukraine will have a better understanding of why the rise of fascism in the neighboring country is so terrifying to the Russian people.

One point that stands out in Stalingrad is the class composition of the Red Army and the class consciousness of the ordinary soldiers fighting German occupation. One soldier reminds another during a dispute that they are fighting in a “worker and peasant army,” showing how ordinary Soviet soldiers conceived of the war in class terms. Another soldier, who remains silent for most of the film, is revealed as a factory worker with an incredible talent for singing. His factory committee, recognizing his talent, sent him to Moscow to sing in operas and arias. Although the film shows us that he is a well-known celebrity, we find out he enlisted in the Red Army the day after the German invasion in 1941.

Contrast that with just about any U.S. war film. Movies like Platoon show working class people in the U.S. forcibly drafted into the military to fight wars on behalf of the rich. Some justify it to themselves in nationalistic terms, but most soldiers were forced to risk their lives because of their class background.

In Stalingrad, the workers fighting Nazi occupation have pride in their class, not just their country, which directly contrasts with the Nazi soldiers. At one point, a German officer tries to psyche his soldiers up to storm the Red Army's neighborhood base by telling them that they will conquer India after defeating the USSR. Addressing a battalion made up of many child soldiers, some no older than 13, he talks about Indian women in the most racist terms and explains the Nazi imperialist project as their reason for fighting. Stalingrad highlights that while the Nazis fought for colonial and imperialist expansion, the Soviet Red Army fought for freedom from the jackboot of fascism.

Technically speaking, the cinematography of Stalingrad is masterful, which was released in IMAX 3-D. An early scene features a large battalion of Soviet soldiers storming a Nazi fuel bunker from the water. The amphibious landing blows up in their face – literally – as the Nazi commanding officers destroy the bunker in order to prevent the Red Army from capturing the fuel. The enormous explosion is only outdone by the sight of Soviet soldiers, burning alive from the oil fire, bravely charging the German barricade and tackling Nazi soldiers to the ground to also burn. Released the same weekend as 300: Rise of an Empire, the sequel to the racist fantasy war epic of the same name, Stalingrad provides all of the stunning visuals and thrills while remaining rooted in reality.

All of that said, you can tell Stalingrad was made in the Russian Federation, and not the Soviet Union, more than 20 years after the restoration of capitalism. The film mentions the Soviet Union and bits of dialogue pay homage to socialism, but the tone of the film is more nationalistic than any World War II films produced in the USSR. After the film, I couldn't help but contrast Stalingrad with Come and See, which focused on the Belarusian resistance to brutal Nazi occupation. If Come and See is the Apocalypse Now of Soviet war films, Stalingrad was much more like Saving Private Ryan. The political nature of the events on-screen is purposely toned down to emphasize the visuals and the plot, which might make the film disappointing to some Soviet history buffs.

The people of the former Soviet Union take the threat of fascism very seriously, and Stalingrad clearly articulates why they should. Most histories of World War II in the West would have us believe that the U.S. single-handedly defeated Hitler. Ultimately, this is why Stalingrad is such an important film for people in the U.S. to see. Of the 60 million people who died in World War II, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the war against fascism, suffering more than 7 million military deaths and millions of other civilian deaths. Even the highest death tolls for the U.S. place the military death toll no higher than 420,000.

Stalingrad forces us to confront the reality of fascism and war from the perspective of Russians, which is more important than ever before with recent developments in Ukraine. The Soviet Union is gone, but the people of Russia all have parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who paid the ultimate sacrifice defeating fascism during World War II. For people in the U.S., World War II films like Stalingrad provide important ground for discussing the roles of other nationalities in defeating the Nazis, which is often downplayed in Hollywood. Stalingrad provides such discussions, and that alone makes it worth the ticket price.

#UnitedStates #Movies #Ukraine #WorldWarII #Stalingrad #USSR

San José, CA – On Feb. 17, the San José Day of Remembrance program commemorated the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. 300 people came to the San Jose Buddhist Church hall to remember E.O. 9066, which led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. At the beginning of the program the emcee, Will Kaku, said that the official apology from the government stated that the concentration camps “were due to racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Although those words pertain to events from 71 years ago, they serve as a warning to us today.”

The first of the evening’s guest speakers was Molly Kitajima, a nisei, or second-generation Japanese American, who was born and grew up in Canada. She told the audience how the Canadian government not only put over 20,000 Japanese Canadians into concentration camps following the U.S., but went further by seizing their land under eminent domain and sold it off cheap. Ms. Kitajima also spoke of her trip to Cuba with other Japanese Americans and their meetings with Japanese Cubans. She ended by saying, “I stand, head high, with those who endured this hardship,” and continued, “I will stand up for others who would be discriminated against as I was.”

The theme of the program was “The Changing Face of America,” which was seen in the diversity of speakers. For the first time, the San José Day of Remembrance invited a speaker from the Sikh community, to express solidarity between Japanese Americans and Sikhs who have been harassed and killed in the years following 2001, and in particular the massacre at the Sikh gurdwara (temple) in 2012. Simran Kaur, Advocacy Manager for the Sikh Coalition, which formed in response to anti-Sikh violence after 2001, proclaimed “Let us stand up together!”

Another highlight of the program was the proclamation presented by the mayor of East Palo Alto, Reuban Abrica, to the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC), which has organized Day of Remembrance events for 32 years in San José. The proclamation was accepted by NOC’s chairperson, Reiko Nakayama.

The Day of Remembrance included a performance by the San José Taiko (Japanese folk drums), including a piece entitled “Day of Remembrance” to commemorate the event. Also speaking were the local Japanese American Congressman Mike Honda, and representatives of the Buddhist Church, the Wesley United Methodist Church and the South Bay Islamic Association, which is just a few blocks from Japantown.

For more photos of the event: San José commemorates 33rd annual Day of Remembrance (Photos)

#SanJoséCA #JapaneseAmericanInternment #DayOfRemembrance #WorldWarII

The film showed the round-up of Japanese Americans after the Japanese empire attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. Korematsu tried to evade the round-up, was caught and arrested, and set to a concentration camp. He fought his arrest all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1944 upheld the government’s round-up by a six to three margin. Then in the 1980s, a team of young Asian American lawyers fought with Korematsu to overturn his conviction on the basis that the government had suppressed evidence that there was no threat from Japanese Americans. A federal court vacated (cancelled) his conviction, but the Supreme Court did not rehear the case, and did not rule the camps unconstitutional.

The film was followed by a panel of speakers from the Japanese American and American Muslim communities. Tom Izu, director of the California History Center of De Anza College in Cupertino, California, spoke about his own experience of being called a traitor by another faculty member after organizing a program on the WWII concentration camps after September 11, 2001. He was followed by Yasir Afifi, a young college student who found a GPS tracking device attached to his car and is currently suing the government over this. The last speaker was Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the Bay Area Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), who said that it was important for people to fight discrimination and government harassment.

The panel was moderated by Masao Suzuki, a member of the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee and the South Bay Committee Against Political Repression, who spoke of his own experience of being visited by the FBI as part of the FBI raids and federal grand jury subpoenas on 23 Midwest anti-war and international solidarity activists. The program was chaired by Will Kaku of the Japanese American Museum of San José, which organized the event. He quoted the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in urging solidarity between the Japanese American community and American Muslims.

#SanJoséCA #JapaneseAmericanInternment #Islamophobia #MasaoSuzuki #AntiWar23 #WorldWarII #FredKorematsu