Nov. 27, 2017
By Joaquim Marques de Sa
The British historian Antony Beevor is one of today’s exponents of the mainstream historiographical current that we have characterized in another article. His books of reactionary re-writing of WWII are in vogue. The author has collected awards from major imperial institutions: Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, member of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, commander of the Order of the Crown, Runciman Prize of the Anglo-Hellenic League, Medlicott Medal for services rendered to the history of UK (!), etc.
What interests does this crusader serve? A first indication is provided by the unsuspected wikipedia: his books were banned from Russian bookstores on charges of Nazi sympathies of the author, of writing about Russia without using Russian sources, and of promoting false stereotypes introduced by Nazi Germany during WWII.
The victory of the USSR over Nazi-Fascism in the WWII continues to annoy reactionaries all over the world, including those of an increasingly fascistic Europe.
Stalingrad, where the greatest battle of history was fought, where the Soviet army under Stalin’s high command crushed the Nazi-Fascist armies of Germany and its allies (Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, fascist volunteer battalions of Dutch, Belgian, Danish, French, etc.) has become something hateful, unpalatable, for the reaction of the whole world. Antony Beevor is a spokesman for this hatred.
Stalingrad was the turning point in the defeat of German Nazism. Without Stalingrad there would have been no total defeat of Germany in 1945 and the liberation of Europe from the terror of enslaved peoples and workers, the end of extermination camps.
Only after Stalingrad, in the beginning of 1943, did Western politicians begin to lose hope on the defeat of the USSR or, at least, on a long war of attrition which would render the USSR irrelevant and allowed Westerners to revise the alliance with the USSR and go back to the times of agreements on world divisions with Hitler. The landings in Italy and Normandy only took place when these imperial hopes were lost, and British and American politicians feared a deepest advance of the Soviet liberation army in Europe.
For these reasons the Soviet victory in Stalingrad became the most hated event by the reactionaries, and compels historians like Beevor to rewrite its history, in alignment with the Nazis.
The Swedish communist Mario Sousa, a scholar on USSR history, published last September an excellent review of Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, which you can read here. Sousa’s review is compelling. It is based on hard evidence and on accounts of authors and eye-witnesses unsuspected of pro-Soviet biases (writer Theodor Plievier, historian Roger R Reese, Hitler’s General Franz Halder, Chief of Army High Command, Hitler’s General Heinz Guderian).
This article first appeared at http://revolucaoedemocracia.
