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By Vicki Morris
On 25 August many Parisians will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the capital, a significant moment in the defeat of the Axis Powers in the Second World War.
On 25 August 1944, overwhelmingly, Parisians cheered the arrival into Paris of the French 2nd Armoured Division in the vanguard of the Allied forces.
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by Mickey Conn
Origins
The first Trotskyist groups had emerged in the mid-1920s as Communist Party
members grew interested in Trotsky's work. With little contact between
groups, and divisions on factional lines, various small groups grew and
split. By 1937, there were three British Trotskyist groups: the small,
Scottish Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), the Revolutionary Socialist
League (RSL) and Militant.
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In Hitler: the Rise of Evil (Channel 4 TV) Robert Carlyle gives a brilliant portrayal of the maniac himself. Carlyle condenses what he was politically and socially into a personality. We see his manner, body language, servile and half-fawning, like a dog with his tail down, towards his social "betters". We see the connection between his floundering attempts to find his own place in the world and his cranky nationalism, his need to find scapegoats and "conspirators" to explain the terrible things that happen to himself and to Germany.
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In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, there are the first stirrings of an independent labour movement. Workers are beginning to organise to deal with the problems of unemployment and unpaid wages, war damage and reconstruction. Many bourgeois commentators look back to the post-war reconstruction of Germany and Japan as enlightened alternatives to US policy in Iraq. In this article, Bruce Robinson examines the history of the German labour movement in the immediate post-war period and discusses questions of relevance today in Iraq.
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By Sean Matgamna
"An injury to one is an injury to all" - and therefore socialists who opposed the recent Iraq war of the USA and UK should back George Galloway?
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Sixty-seven years ago this month the Nazis began their final assault on the Warsaw Ghetto, where 40,000 Jews were making a last desperate, heroic stand against Nazi barbarians determined to annihilate
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Not your usual Hollywood Holocaust
Roman Polanski's Palme d'Or-winning film about the Warsaw Ghetto is one that certainly deserves to get a wide audience. It is based on the autobiography of Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, who was one of the twenty Jewish residents (from a starting point of 360,000) of the capital to survive the holocaust.
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The bulk of this volume is an examination of the economic talks between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR in 1939-41, while Stalin remained “neutral” and Hitler was at war with the West. They ended with the German attack on the Soviet Union, on 22 June 1941. As Ericson puts it, “Nazi Germany turned to bite the hand that had fed it for the past twenty-two months.”
