This, on another thread on the recent phenomenon/discussion of Antifa, which makes the connection between our local opposition to fascists and the possibility of a more general opposition:
Anti-Fascism is less an ideology than it is a strategic perspective based upon the necessity of resisting fascism by any means necessary.
[…]
The Democrats, the Labour Party along with most other socialist or progressive parties have no interest in uniting with working class communists and radicals as part of an Anti-Fascist front, they have no interest in Anti-Fascism full stop, because at this point they aren't at war with a fascist government and they're not in a position where they must unite into a coalition of Anti-Fascist governments in order to resist an existential threat posed by fascist expansionism.
https://libcom.org/forums/theory/chomsky-antifa-17082017?page=1#comment-598254
This, from Philip Sansom, one of the UK War Commentary anarchists jailed in 1945 for opposition to the Second World War:
What, after all, did the anti-war movement amount to? […] There was the anarchist movement, small but quite clear and united, with the exception of some of the Spanish exiles, recently (i.e., 1939) fled from Spain, who held that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini would inevitably lead to the downfall of Franco. These comrades, experienced in the anti-fascist struggle in Spain, had much to tell us about the Spanish Revolution, but were sadly naive about world politics. We knew the ‘democracies’ would much rather see a fascist state in Spain than another revolution, and we have been proved right.
https://libcom.org/history/anarchists-against-army-philip-sansom
Sansom continues:
We were revolutionaries, not traitors. Because we would not fight for Churchill and the British Empire (remember Britain still ruled in India, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia...) did not mean that we wanted Hitler to win. What we wanted — and what anarchists in Germany, Italy, France, America, Japan and, as far as we could guess, in Russia too, wanted — was for the people of their own countries to make a social revolution against their own warring rulers, to establish a social order in which capitalism, with all the internal and external violence upon which it depends (crystallised for the anarchists in ‘the state’) was swept away and replaced by the truly free society.
https://libcom.org/history/anarchists-against-army-philip-sansom
Yes, obviously, the anarchist ‘Spanish exiles’ were ultimately mistaken in their hope that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini might lead to the removal of Franco (and the possibility of a resurgence of revolution in Spain).
But were the anti-war anarchists centred around War Commentary, despite the times they lived in, wrong to abstain from the fight against the very real threat of an ‘expansionary fascism’ in Europe, and even to argue that soldiers should abandon the fight against the specific threat of Fascism represented by Hitler and Mussolini in order to fight a more general struggle against capitalism at home? Was that struggle at home any more, in reality, than a pipe-dream?
Was the War Commentary group attempting to sabotage the effort against fascism?
Surely, if the threat of fascism must be countered in the most effective way ("by any means necessary") then the Spanish exiles here were right? Should Philip Sansom and the others have signed up and encouraged others to do the same? What do we think about this?
(This was discussed before, but not in the context of discussion that has taken place on Libcom since 2009/10: https://libcom.org/forums/history-culture/anarchist-position-ww2-30122009 )
The Trotskyists were also against participation in the WW2, unless it was on the side of the Soviet Union, which in the 1930s was widely regarded as the only and ultimate defence against fascism, despite its problems:
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/894/qotw.html
https://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1941/07/fascism.htm
Sansom writes of the Trotskyists in the UK:
https://libcom.org/history/anarchists-against-army-philip-sansom
And the British Communist Party:
https://libcom.org/history/anarchists-against-army-philip-sansom