Tortilla con Sal, May 9th 2015

Few things could be more symbolic of Western Bloc decline and desperation than those countries' absence from the 70th Anniversary commemoration of the end of World War 2 in Moscow today. The political leaders of North America and Europe stayed away in protest over the Russian Federation's support for the Russian speaking population in Ukraine. Today, while the majority of the world joins Russia in celebrating the defeat of Nazism, US and European governments train and arm Nazi militias in Ukraine and genocidal takfiri terrorists in Syria.

Current Western Bloc foreign policy is the logical development of those countries' imperialist, colonial past. During the Second World War, what Europeans found so shocking about Nazi crimes was that the victims were white Europeans. In the very moment of the Western and Soviet allies' victory against Nazism, the French colonial authorities masscred around 45,000 Algerians in Setif with impunity. Throughout Asia and Africa, the Western colonial elites oversaw the massacre of millions of people, from Setif, to Madagascar to Cheju in Korea. They did so to salvage what they could of  the pre-war colonial order and fix in place the post-1945 system of neocolonialism and Cold War.

Britain offers a good example of the way in which a ruling oligarchy could game the electoral system to defend its power and control. The 1945 election is often presented as a radical democratic moment. But 70 years on, its meaning in domestic and international terms looks different. Domestically, that election was a safety valve allowing Britain's imperialist elite to stabilize their power in the face of strong egalitarian social pressures. Overseas, Britain's ruling class agreed a new imperialist division of labour with the United States and France, working against the Soviet Union

70 years on, Britain has just had an election in which a right wing government has been re-elected with the support of only 25% of the electorate. The same would have been true had the vote favoured its centre-right opponents. Electoral politics in the Western Bloc countries have degenerated a long way from the apparently radical moment of 1945, offering voters an ever-narrower range of options.

In 1944, leading US Democrat politican Henry Wallace remarked, “The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.” (Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, New York Times, April 9, 1944.)

Successive elections in North America and Western Europe demonstrate the perennial truth of Wallace's insight. Even so, Western liberal and social democrat opinion bends over backwards to pretend that the Western political system of electoral democracy is one of impregnable moral authority, resilient in the face of fascism. In fact, almost all Western countries maintain a system, punctuated by mostly irrelevant elections, of oligarchic corporate consumer capitalism founded in large part on the very practice Henry Wallace denounced back in 1944.

Outside North America and Europe, the majority world sees very little change in the imperialist practice of Western countries. Since 1945 hardly anything has changed in the marriage of Western corporate owned political interests with the coercive security and military apparatus of the State. If anything this fascist political archetype predominates more than ever in the countries of the Western Bloc. The affinity in moral terms between imperialist Western governments and the fascist regimes defeated above all by the Soviet Union in 1945 is undeniable.

The history of US government support for Latin American fascist dictatorships, for apartheid South Africa and Israel's colonialist settler State since World War 2 is damning. Now, more blatantly than ever, events in Ukraine and Syria as well as continuing Western neocolonial interventions in Africa all point to a fascist policy continuity that should surprise no one. Current United States and European support for the fascist conspiracy against Venezuela's legitimate government is the natural corrollary of US and European government involvement in the fascist putsch in Ukraine.

In the economic sphere, that fascist affinity is self-evident in the drive  by Western Bloc elites to impose supra-national corporate welfare deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. However much fascism shape-shifts in time and place, its varieties conform to the same formula : poisonous information media; economic, financial and trade gangsterism; crude social and political intimidation and, ultimately, murderous armed aggression. For Latin America and the Caribbean, the 70th Anniversary commemoration in Moscow is one more  reminder of the sacrifice to pay once fascism takes power.