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HISTORY IS OUR BATTLEGROUND
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Walter Baier
May 7, 2025
Transform!Europe
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_ This year marks a crucial moment in the struggle over historical
memory. We commemorate the liberation of the concentration camps, the
capitulation of the German Wehrmacht, and the end of Nazi barbarism.
But what lessons have been learned? _
Slovenian partisans during a liberation celebration in Železna Kapla
/ Bad Eisenkappel, Austria, 1945, Image credit: © delavnicaMUZEJ v
Domu Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (WerkStattMuseum im Margarete
Schütte-Lihotzky Haus), Klagenfurt/Celovec.
Fifty-five million people perished in the Second World War. Six
million Jews were murdered in concentration and extermination camps,
victims of the Nazis’ murderous and racist ideology. On the
territory of the former Soviet Union—today’s Russia, Ukraine, and
Belarus—27 million people fell to Nazi genocidal aggression.
However, the pledge made in 1945 to never again allow fascism and war
was broken within just a few years by political leaders.
Humanity’s entry into the era of potential collective suicide began
with the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—events that
took place 80 years ago this August. Hundreds of thousands of people
were burned alive or suffocated within seconds, and countless
survivors have suffered the lasting effects of nuclear fallout to this
day.
Some describe the 20th century, with its wars, war crimes, and
genocides, as a century of collective trauma. But two opposing
historical forces have always been at play. The 20th century was also
a century of national and anti-colonial liberation.
In April, we marked the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference in
Indonesia, where leaders from 29 newly decolonised African and Asian
nations laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement, heralding an
era of national liberation.
Twenty years after Bandung, in May 1975, the United States was forced
to acknowledge defeat in the Vietnam War. The German Swedish writer
Peter Weiss summarised the lesson of that war, which claimed over two
million lives, with these words: _“The mightiest robber can no
longer carry home his prey.”_
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev once warned that in the next war, the
living would envy the dead. The growing realisation among
elites—both East and West—that a nuclear war would mean the end of
humanity opened new pathways for peace in the last quarter of the 20th
century. Out of this understanding came the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), whose Final Act was signed 50 years ago,
on August 1. Thirty-five states from Europe and North America sought
to establish lasting and peaceful coexistence on our continent.
«But today, Europe is preparing for a new Cold War that could easily
usher in a hot war. In January, a majority in the European Parliament
reduced the “liberation of Europe from National Socialism” to a
mere Russian narrative, dismissing its commemoration as an idea used
by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.»
Eighty years after the defeat of fascism, authoritarian leaders such
as Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, and Erdoğan are proving—through
rhetoric and action—that the far right is not a relic of the past
but a present and pressing danger. As if the horrors of war and
fascism had been wiped out, war is once again being legitimized as
“a continuation of politics by other means”. Societies are being
militarised, populations are being divided along racial, religious,
and cultural lines. The global public are watching live reports of
genocide and ethnic cleansing.
We socialists have not forgotten that this year also marks the 110th
anniversary of the Zimmerwald Conference, where a small group of
determined anti-war social democrats met in Zimmerwald, Switzerland,
to embed the struggle for peace into the very DNA of the radical left.
«Today, fascism and war are not phantoms of the past; they are real
and present dangers. It is up to the people—peace movements, trade
unions, civil society, and the political left—to ensure that Europe
does not once again slide into catastrophe.»
_Walter Baier, an Austrian politician and economist based in Vienna,
assumed the presidency of the Party of the European Left in December
2022. Previously, Baier was the national chairman of the Communist
Party of Austria (KPÖ) from 1994 to 2006 and editor of the Austrian
magazine Volksstimme [[link removed]]. Since 2000, he
has worked on dialogue between atheists and Catholics through the
project DIALOP [[link removed]], leading in the last years to
meetings with Pope Ratzinger and Pope Francis. From 2007 to 2022, he
was political coordinator and board member of the transform! europe
network._
_transform! europe is a network of 38 European organisations from 22
countries, active in the field of political education and critical
scientific analysis, and is the recognised political foundation
corresponding to the Party of the European Left (EL)._
* World War II
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* Anti-Fascism
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* new cold war
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* Militarism
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